The rearrangement of the letters of a word to form another word, like “listen” to “silent,” is called an anagram.
An anagram uses all the original letters exactly once, rearranging them into a new word or phrase. “Listen” and “silent” are a classic example because they contain the same six letters. Anagrams can also be formed from phrases, such as “the eyes” and “they see.”
The word comes through Latin from the Greek ana-, meaning “again” or “back,” and gramma, meaning “letter.” Anagrams have been used as word puzzles, literary devices, and playful forms of cryptography. The ancient Greek poet Lycophron was traditionally associated with making anagrams of royal names.
An anagram is different from a homonym, which is a word that sounds or looks like another word but has a different meaning. It is also different from a palindrome, which reads the same forward and backward, such as “level.”