The 27th Letter of the Alphabet

Rogues, to speak thus irreverently of the alphabet, I shall live to see you glad to serve old Q — to curl the wig of great S — adjust the dot of little i — stand behind the chair of X. Y. Z. — wear the livery of Etcetera — and ride behind the sulky of And-by-itself-and.

From Act I of Charles Lamb's Mr. H

If you were a schoolchild in the 19th century, the alphabet that you learned would have had 27 letters: all 26 letters of our current alphabet, plus the ampersand symbol.

A	B	C	D	E
F	G	H	I	J
K	L	M	N	O
P	Q	R	S	T
U	V	W	X	Y
	Z		&

Due to the awkwardness of ending a recitation of the alphabet with "W X Y Z and", it was traditional to instead say "W X Y and Z, and per se and", where per se, Latin for "by itself", means that &, standing by itself, represents "and". (Words with one-letter spellings, like A or I, were often orally spelt as "A per se" or "A per se A".) It was this process of alphabet recitation, and hurried enunciations of "and per se and" which spawned a variety of names for the & symbol which ultimately converged on "ampersand". & had been part of the alphabet going back to the days of Old English.

Other than standing for the conjunction "and", the ampersand also sometimes appears in the abbreviation &c, for et cetera. This is due to the origins of the & symbol in the first century A.D., when the Romans would write et (Latin for "and") in cursive in a run-together fashion which became a stand-alone written symbol.

So why do we no longer consider & to be part of the alphabet?

The leading theory is that it's because of that alphabet song, the one that goes

A B C D E F G
H I J K LMNOP
Q R S, T U V
W X, Y and Z.
Now I know my A B Cs.
Next time won't you sing with me?

Many incorrectly believe that this is based on a tune by Mozart. While Mozart wrote variations on this theme at the age of 25 [see Köchel listing K. 265], the original melody that inspired him was a French folk song called "Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman" which eventually served as the music for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. In 1835, the alphabet song was copyrighted under the name "The A.B.C., a German air with variations for the flute with an easy accompaniment for the piano forte", so it does seem like Mozart was responsible for popularizing the melody.

It turns out that that song has influence beyond the ousting of the ampersand. Historically, it has been mainly in the U.S. that Z has been pronounced zee; pretty much everywhere else they say zed. But a quick look at the rhyming scheme of the alphabet song, shows that the zee pronunciation works better. And apparently a lot of children who learn English outside of the U.S. are still exposed to this alphabet song through American children's programming, like Sesame Street. Teachers in England reportedly have to correct kindergarteners who enter school singing the alphabet song in an American accent, right down to the zee.

I leave you with this quote from Steven Wright:

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? The guy who wrote that song wrote everything.

An article about the makers of Bananagrams

The Boston Globe has published a nice article about the invention of Bananagrams, giving more details than I have ever previous encountered, a photograph of the Nathansons (the family that invented the game four years ago), and quotes from Abe Nathanson himself.

The article describes how different family members contributed to different aspects of Bananagrams and how many of the details of gameplay were developed by Abe while working on his own over the course of almost a year.

Abe's aversion to the big retailers and the way they do business is the reason that Bananagrams is not sold at stores such as Toys R Us or Wal-Mart. Similarly, the Nathansons have no interest in selling the rights to Bananagrams to any of the big toy companies. Their success in independently developing a game from concept to best-selling juggernaut makes for an interesting story.

The last paragraph of the article is a hint about future directions of the company:

"We're almost at the point where we have more money than we need," says Nathanson, adding that he's drawing the line at creating any more fruit games. Bananagrams will always be the gold standard, he says, "and we don't want to kill a good idea."

So, no more new fruit-based games. Next up: Cabbagegrams! Lettuce Play! Beet, Don't Fail Me Now!

The games of Lewis Carroll

In addition to his anagramming prowess and his wonderfully surreal and whimsical stories, Lewis Carroll is known for creating numerous games and puzzles.

He is credited with the invention and popularization of the doublet (a.k.a, Word Ladder) in which one transforms one word into another, one letter at a time, with all the intermediary steps being legitimate words. Two examples:

          EAST          CAT
          FAST          COT
          FEST          COG
          WEST          DOG

Admittedly, this is really more of a puzzle or a pastime than a game.

He spent much of his professional life tutoring students in mathematics and logic. He invented a game called The Game of Logic designed to teach the fundamentals of formal logic, using a unique way of representing logic propositions with a game board and colored tokens. The game is described in a book of the same name (available from Project Gutenberg (though they seem not to have gotten the figures right)). Ultimately though, it seems to be for one player and seems rather like a puzzle.

Carroll also thought about and devised rules for playing billiards (the British sort, played on a table without pockets) on a circular table.

In 1880, he wrote in his diary that "A game might be made of letters, to be moved about on a chess-board till they form words.". Martin Gardner (famous for his writings on recreational mathematics) took such notes from the writings of Carroll and fleshed them out into a board game in which, as I understand it, letters are placed on the first row of a chessboard and can be moved like queens to form a word in the fifth row. Meanwhile your opponent is trying to do the same thing while blocking you. (Rows 2, 3, 6, and 7 are open to everyone.) Like Scrabble, once a word has been formed, more letters are drawn from a bag, and the first row is replenished. You can buy the game here. I am thinking of playing an improvised version with a chessboard and a set of Bananagrams tiles.

History of anagrams: Anagramming as recreation and social skill

Anagrams were very popular during the 17th century, and particularly in France. King Louis XIII used anagrams as a recreational form of intellectual stimulation and source of entertainment for himself and members of his court. He formed some on his own and hired a Royal Anagrammatist whose sole task was to devise anagrams. A lot of these anagrams were based on the names of people, and particularly, on the name of the king with the theme being how great he was.

The book "Of Anagrams" by Henry Benjamin Wheatley (downloadable for free from its Google Books entry) says that "Anagrams were used by fine gentlemen to add pungency to their conversation". It cites Henry Peacham's "Compleat Gentleman" (written in 1634) which basically says that among the conversational skills of a gentleman ("merry tales, wittie questions and answers", "ingenious epigrams") should be the spontaneous spouting of anagrams. He gives the example of someone who was going to say "I must goe buy a dagger" but decided to switch around the letters and say "I must goe dye a beggar". [It's not strictly an anagram though; it's actually a rearrangement of sounds. A more precise description might be "anaphone".]

In the 19th century, it was popular to anagram the names of famous people (celebrities, I suppose). Lewis Carroll produced many such anagrams, including Florence Nightingale ("Flit on, cheering angel."), Disraeli ("I lead, sir."), and a politician of the time named William Ewart Gladstone ("Wild agitator means well!"). The popularity of anagramming at the time led to the Victorian game of Anagrams (previously described here and which now is sold under the name "Snatch") which was played by Alfred Butts as a child. His first attempts at inventing a game drew inspiration from the idea of anagramming as the basis of a game, to which he added a letter distribution like that of the English language. After a few more iterations, he converged on the game of Scrabble, which led to Speed Scrabble, which led to Bananagrams.

History of anagrams: Anagrams as encryption

Galileo was a professor in Padua, Italy, studying physics and mathematics, when he heard about the sudden development of telescopes in Holland. Guessing at how they worked, he created his own in 1609 and began promoting it for the monitoring of ships by merchants.
By the fall, he began using it for astronomical observations. He designed a series of successively better telescopes, giving him the ability to discern smaller details of the night sky than anyone before him. This opened up a gold rush of scientific exploration. Galileo was able to make astronomical discoveries very fast, but such discoveries could sometimes take months or years to verify, which left him with a dilemma: If he announced his discovery immediately, he could eventually turn out to have made a mistake; if he waited, one of his competitors might find the same thing and get the credit. Galileo's solution (and possibly one already in use by other scientists) was to write a short description of his findings, rearrange the letters, and distribute the coded version. In that way, he could reveal his conclusions at any time in the future.

In 1610, he sent letters to his fellow scientists, containing the following string of letters:

smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras

Fellow astronomer, Johannes Kepler anagrammed very hard and came up with this solution:

Salve umbistineum geminatum Martia proles.

which translates to "Be greeted, double knob, offspring of Mars", and which Kepler interpreted to mean that Galileo had discovered that Mars has two moons, something that Kepler had predicted. But it turned out that Kepler's anagram was not the one that Galileo had had in mind. Allegedy the Holy Roman Emperor became interested in Galilelo's finding, and so Galileo finally revealed the actual original sentence to be

Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi.

which translates roughly to "I have observed the most distant of planets (Saturn) to have a triple form" (where U and V are treated as interchangeable in Latin). Galileo thought that he had observed two moons orbiting Saturn. He was wrong, as Huygens showed in 1656 that what Galileo had seen was actually a ring around Saturn. Huygens wrote an anagram about this, too.

In December of 1610, Galileo made an even bigger discovery which he transmitted as a true anagram:

Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur oy.

which, translated, means roughly "This was already tried by me in vain prematurely". Kepler pleaded with him to reveal what he had found, and so in January, Galileo replied with the unanagrammed sentence:

Cynthiae figuras aemulatur Mater Amorum.

Translation: "The Mother of Loves [Venus] imitates the figures of Cynthia [the Moon]." by which Galileo meant that Venus cycles through phases, just like the Moon. He had observed that Venus is not a light source - it simply reflects light from the Sun. And from the way it waxed and waned like the Moon, he could tell that Venus was orbiting the Sun. At a time when many held that everything revolved around the Earth, this was an amazing result.

In the 1670s, Robert Hooke was studying the physics of springs. He found that when you stretch a spring, the force that it pulls back with is proportional to the distance that you pull it. This came to be known as Hooke's Law. Hooke encrypted this in a popular way among scientists of the time: He simply alphabetized the letters and got "ceiiinosssttuv". The unscrambled version is "Ut tensio sic vis." which he revealed a few years later to mean "As the extension, so the force.".

Hooke held on to another discovery much longer. In 1671, he announced to the Royal Society of London (a group of scientists, dedicated to advancing scientific knowledge) that he had figured out what the optimal shape for the arch of a bridge was. Four years later, he published the encoded form of his conclusion:
The unanagrammed form was not revealed until after he died in 1703(!). It read "As hangs a flexible cable, so inverted, stand the touching pieces of an arch." which means that if you hang a chain between two poles, you get a special curve called a catenary, and if you turn it upside down, this is the best shape for supporting a bridge.

I am guessing that the practice of anagramming conclusions in this way gradually disappeared as more formal publication methods were developed (the earliest probably being the journals published by the Royal Society of London starting in 1665).

In a way, this kind of encryption was not so different from the seeking of metaphysical truth through anagramming (as covered in a previous post), except that the scientists were deliberately putting the distilled form of the truth on the other end of the anagram and letting people search for it.


For more background on Galileo and his anagrams, you can read http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath151.htm.

For more about Hooke's law and his caternary findings, see: http://www.lindahall.org/events_exhib/exhibit/exhibits/civil/design.shtml.

And for a fictionalized account of 17th century science and the development of the Royal Society (among other things), try Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

History of anagrams: Anagrams as prophecy

One half of the Bananagrams family tree was sketched out in this post which basically covered the inheritance of traits from crossword puzzles by way of Scrabble. But the inventor of Scrabble had another influence beyond word games that arranged words in intersecting columns and rows: An emphasis on anagramming. So, I've dug into the historical roots of anagrams. Here is some of what I have found:

While evidence from the time of the Greeks is spotty, it is thought that Pythagoras and his Pythagoreans may have been rearranging the letters of words in the 6th century B.C., as they believed that anagramming someone's name could reveal information about their destiny. Later, in 332 B.C., Alexander the Great was in the midst of a six-month siege of the city of Tyre, when one night he had a nightmare about a satyr trying to catch him. He asked his soothsayers about it, and they noted that in Greek the word for "satyr" anagrams to "Tyre is thine.". The next day, Alexander finally captured Tyre.

From a very insightful book called The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life by Marcel Danesi:

Soothsayer status was, in fact, often attained by those who claimed to possess knowledge of anagrams. In the third century B.C., for instance, the Greek poet and prophet Lycophron made a profession of devising anagrams of the names of the members of the Hellenistic king Ptolemy II's court in Egypt, as a basis for divining each persons' character and destiny. For this he became widely known and sought out as a soothsayer.

After the time of the Romans, there is little evidence of anagram use until its resurgence in the Middle Ages. As most educated people were associated with the Church, most anagrams from that era relate to religion and are in Latin. The most popular example is this imagined exchange between Pontius Pilate and Jesus:

Pilate: Quid est veritas? ("What is truth?")

Jesus: Est vir qui adest. ("It is the man before you.")

I have to admit, it would be really cool to answer somebody with an anagram of their own question.

The Kabbalists were mystics from the Middle Ages for whom anangramming held particular importance. To understand their interest in manipulating letters and numbers, it helps to know a bit about the ancient Hebrew language.

Ancient Hebrew did not have a separate system for numbers, so the letters of the Hebrew alphabet were used instead. This led to numerology (adding up the numerical values of letters in a word, and regarding the sum as significant to the word). Ancient Hebrew also did not have a conventional alphabet; it had an "abjad" which is a writing system where vowels are not written, but inferred by the reader. This made anagramming much easier. (Just imagine how much easier it would be to play Bananagrams if you could use "NRG" for "energy", "GRN" for "green", and "RNG" for "ring"!)

For the Kabbalists, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet held special powers. They developed a wide variety of rule-based systems for transforming one word into another. Some, like Atbash, were simple substitution cyphers (A->Z, B->Y, C->X,...). Temurah (the Hebrew word for "permutation") was the Kabbalistic art of anagramming. The Kabbalists believed that through such manipulation of names and verses in the Torah, they could uncover fundamental knowledge about the universe. They wore anagrams on amulets which they believed protected them from evil (a practice common among many others in the ancient world)

My guess is that if they had had the opportunity to play, the Kabbalists would have been Bananagrams maniacs.

More anagramming history, coming in a future post.

"Bananagrams!: the official book" - coming in September, 2009

The first Bananagrams-themed book is on its way:
Bananagrams!: The Official Book. It sounds like the book has a huge variety of Bananagrams-based puzzles (presumably puzzles you can solve using your Bananagrams tiles) as well as tactics for Bananagrams and random fun.

About the authors:
Joe Edley, the Zen master of competitive Scrabble, was featured as one of the main characters in Stefan Fatsis' _Word Freak_, the original investigation of the world of Scrabble tournaments (followed up by two documentaries (Word Wars and Scrabylon)). I really enjoyed _Word Freak_.

And from the Amazon page:

Abe Nathanson and his daughter, Rena, along with his grandchildren Aaron and Ava invented Bananagrams while spending the summer of 2005 together at a beach house in Narragansett, Rhode Island. The whole Nathanson family is involved in the growing game business. Rena and her family reside in the U.K., and Abe lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he runs the company's headquarters.

According to the official Bananagrams origins story, Bananagrams was created by the Nathanson family during summer vacations, through a process of experimentation. Not unlike the Wright Brothers' persistent tinkering until they achieved perfection.

Why "Bananagrams"? Because they say that it is "the anagram game that will drive you bananas!".

The ancestry of Bananagrams

What if a game like Bananagrams had been invented before Scrabble? Would Scrabble be as popular as it is today? Would it even have been manufactured? There are definitely people who like Scrabble but do not enjoy the pace of Bananagrams. But I would guess that Bananagrams could not have become popular before Scrabble, because the idea of the freefrom grid would have been a little too radical.

Scrabble was invented in 1931, and the inventor was inspired by crossword puzzles (which were a massive fad during the Twenties... picture women wearing crossword-puzzle stockings). And the inventor of the crossword puzzle was, in turn, inspired by word square puzzles where the objective was to construct a grid of tightly interlocking words to form a square (or other shape) based on clued words. A typical word square looks like this:

     C A R D
     A R E A
     R E A R
     D A R T

It is an interesting exercise to try to construct a word square,
By specifying the letters in such a square, this can be turned into a relatively easy puzzle.


Word squares as puzzles date back centuries, but the word square formation has been in existence for at least two millennia. (See the palindromic SATOR square.) Finally, the Greeks are credited with the idea of ordering letters in lined-up rows and columns (c. 600 B.C.), though without any words running vertically.

These are some of the giants whose shoulders Bananagrams perches upon. Remember to thank them the next time you pray to the Bananagrams gods for good tiles.

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Further reading: The Straight Dope on why crossword puzzles are symmetrical.