Anagram Rules

The four rules everyone agrees on

These four hold in every dictionary, word game and puzzle column. If a pair breaks one of them, it is not an anagram, whoever says otherwise.

• Every letter is used. Nothing from the original can be dropped. PUNISHMENTS does not give NINE THUMPS, because the final S has nowhere to go.
• Nothing is added. The new word cannot bring in letters the original never had. A phrase that needs one extra T is a near-miss, not an anagram.
• Repeats are counted. A letter used twice on one side must appear twice on the other. LOOP → POOL keeps both Os; LOOP and PLOP share letters but not their counts.
• It is a different arrangement. SAVE → VASE qualifies. Writing SAVE again, or changing only its capitals, does not.

The two rules that depend on the setter

The remaining two rules are conventions, and this is where most disagreements come from. By default, spaces and punctuation are ignored: DORMITORY → DIRTY ROOM is accepted even though one side has a space and the other does not. A strict setter may insist that the spacing and punctuation match as well, which rules that pair out.

Capital letters are ignored for the same reason. Names are written with capitals and ordinary words are not, so a strict case rule would make most name anagrams impossible. Almost nobody applies it, but it is worth knowing the rule exists when someone objects.

The tester at the top of this page checks all six separately and names the first rule a pair breaks, with strict mode on or off, so you can see exactly which one an argument is really about.

Rules in word games

Board games add rules of their own on top. In Scrabble and similar games, the result must appear in the dictionary the game uses, so proper nouns, abbreviations and hyphenated words are out. A blank tile can stand for any letter, which bends the "nothing added" rule in a controlled way: the blank supplies the letter but scores nothing.

Different games use different dictionaries, so a word can be valid in one and missing from another. When a game matters, agree on the dictionary before you start rather than in the middle of a dispute.

Rules in puzzles and crosswords

Cryptic crosswords follow the four strict rules exactly and ignore spacing and case. The clue signals that an anagram is involved with an indicator word such as "confused", "broken" or "novel", and the letters to rearrange appear somewhere in the clue itself. The answer must use every one of them, and no others.

Wordplay competitions are usually more forgiving about meaning than about letters. An anagram that is funny or apt wins, but only if the letters are exact. A near-miss with a better joke is disqualified.