Recently in my work in speech processing I came across the words “cepstrum” and “cepstral”, which mean something similar to “spectrum” and “spectral” (in the sense of the division of a sound signal into different frequencies). Apparently the origin of “cepstrum” is as an anagram of “spectrum”.
Most physicists will know the word “mho”, which is the unit of conductance, as “ohm” is the unit of resistance. Because conductance is the inverse of resistance, some witty physicist or engineer reversed “ohm” to get “mho”.
Does anyone know any other cases of words being formed by anagrams? Is this ever done outside the geeky world of physics and engineering? Is there a fancy name for it?
(Um, as usual I have no idea what category to put my question in. Is this ok?)