An anagram is a word or a short phrase that you make by moving around the letters of another word or phrase. Listen is an anagram of silent; the letters are the same, only the order has changed. People play anagrams as a puzzle, and writers sometimes hide names this way. You can also use it as a verb, though the noun is much more common: to anagram a word is to shuffle its letters into a new one. It is not just any riddle, and it is not a palindrome — a palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards, like level. Though actually, a good anagram in English often tries to make a real new word, not a heap of leftover letters. Teachers like it because it makes students look at spelling, not only at meaning.