Anacronym

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A word created by rearranging or scrambling the letters of a different word, such as 'listen' and 'silent'
2. A word made by shifting around the letters from another word in a new order, like 'dormitory' and 'dirty room'
3. Any word whose letters can be rearranged to spell a different word, formed by simply reordering the same characters

Etymology: "Anacronym" is a word for a word that is an acronym in name only: one whose letters once stood for something, but whose origin is now forgotten by most users. The term is itself probably a blend, either of "anachronism" and "acronym" or of the prefix "an-" with "acronym," and the source is uncertain on which. Either way, the blend fits the meaning: the word's own formation is out of step with its current use, just as an anachronism is out of its time. The idea behind the term is that many familiar words began as abbreviations but have long since lost their connection to the full phrase. Most speakers using such a word do not think about what its letters originally represented, so the acronymic character has faded into ordinary vocabulary. The coinage thus describes a whole class of words by the very process that produced them, and the wording is a little playful in doing so.