Is there a name for this kind of anagram?

Question

I was thinking about anagrams and I was wondering if there was a name for anagrams that keep the relative order of the letters, but instead rearranges them by moving the starting point of the word and moving the earlier letters to the end of the word. The new construction would also have to be a word.

Examples:

• stop -> s || top -> tops
• amen -> ame || n -> name
• space -> s || pace -> paces
• demo -> de || mo -> mode

It's really hard thinking of these, though I'm sure if I had the patience I could just write a script to find them for me. Is there a name for this kind of anagram?

PS - Apologies if this isn't the right place to ask these kinds of questions, I just figured a group like this would be more likely to know than grammar people.

Answer 1

The National Puzzlers' League calls this a transpogram.

A word or phrase becomes another when divided into two parts, which are interchanged. For example: ONE = rock-hard, TWO = hard rock (referring to the kind of music). Answers must be dictionary entries (or well known) but the parts need not be: for example, ONE = alloy, TWO = loyal.

The latter example is similar to your demo / mode example, where demo and mode are each dictionary entries, but the parts de and mo are not.

The specific case of taking the first letter and moving it to the end (e.g. stop / tops) they call a head-to-tail shift.

A word or phrase becomes another when its first letter is moved to its end. For example: ONE = emanate, TWO = manatee; or ONE = brand, TWO = R and B.

Answer 2

I'm not aware of an existing name for the method of constructing anagrams you describe. The method for creating any anagram is, of course, to rearrange the letters to form a new word or words, which could be achieved by moving one letter, or any number of letters, so no matter how many letters you move or where you move them from/to, there is really just one method.

However, there are names for various different types of anagram based on the resulting word - for example, a single word anagram formed from another single word (as in your examples) is a synanagram.

Also, a pair of anagrams which can form a short coherent sentence can be described as either a pairagram or a transposed couplet, so "demo mode" could be an example of this. Two words which are closely related in meaning can also be considered a pairagram, so arguably "space" and "paces" could be considered as such as they can both refer to a measured distance.

Answer 3

In JavaScript we might code (into the console):

str="snail";

"snail"

strArr=str.split('');

[object Array]: ["s", "n", "a", "i", "l"]

strArr.push(...strArr.splice(0,1));

5

strArr.join('');

"nails"

so:

'Splice and Push' anagrams