Way back in 1989 my friend M@ and I used to work at a font company called Kingsley/ATF Type Corporation. One evening after work — actually we were still at work, physically speaking — we began to consider the subject of anagrams of the company name. After running off the necessary letters (in 100pt ITC Galliard all caps from an Adobe Type 1 font, using Microsoft Word 4.0 on a Mac SE, printing to a 300dpi Apple LaserWriter NTX) and cutting them out (I forget the brand name of the scissors) we set to with gusto.
The results you can see below. Some phrases are innately anagrammable and some aren’t. KINGSLEY/ATF and KINGSLEY/ATF TYPE CORP had vast possibilities, some (SLAG TYPE FIN?) stretching the limits of comprehensibility, others (ALFKE GIN STY, ITSY FLAN KEG, TINTY SLOG) proving so useful that they worked their way into our daily conversation. I’ve highlighted my favorites in boldface.
KINGSLEY / A.T.F.
KINGSLEY / A.T.F. TYPE CORP.
INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
Here’s a list I found back in 1995:
(Information Superhighway anagrams copyright ©1995 by the author, Mike Morton. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this, in whole or in part, in any form provided you retain this paragraph unchanged.)
Make Your Own Anagrams
The correct way to generate anagrams is to write or print the source word/phrase in large type, cut out the letters, and push them around. But if you’re feeling lazy, you can try an automatic anagram generator. Of course, you’ll still have to pick through a huge list of anagrams for the few that actually make any sense at all.