10 Words That Hide a Completely Unrelated Word

Every word is made of borrowed letters. Shuffle them and you often find another word standing there — one that has nothing to do with the first.

Below are ten ordinary words, and the unrelated words hiding in their letters. None of the pairs are related in meaning: a raccoon is not a crown, and vanilla has nothing to say about villas. The letters simply happen to line up.

Raccoon

The best find on this list. Take the letters of “raccoon” and you can build corona, the ring of light around the sun. You can also make acorn, which at least a raccoon might eat, and cocoa, which it certainly should not.

The double c and double o do most of the work here. They are also what makes the word so easy to misspell. All 42 words from raccoon are worth a look if you want the rest.

Angular

“Angular” describes something with sharp corners. Its letters give you lunar, which belongs to the moon and has no corners at all.

The same letters also produce gnarl, ulna — the bone in your forearm — and granular, which keeps every one of the seven letters and adds two more. 79 words come out of angular, the longest tally here.

Vanilla

Seven letters, and a villa inside them. Also an anvil, which is about as far from a flavouring as a noun can get.

Two more are worth knowing: avail and naval. Both need the second a, which is the letter most people forget when they write the word.

Static

This one is a gift for anyone teaching spelling. “Static” contains attic and tacit — two words that share every letter with each other, and neither of which has anything to do with electricity or with standing still.

If your students already know static, ask them to find tacit before you tell them. It takes longer than you would expect. 44 words come from these six letters.

Explore

Inside “explore” sits elope, which is a kind of journey, though not the kind anyone plans an expedition around. There is also lore, expel and leper.

Add letters rather than rearranging them and the word keeps going: explorer, explored, explores.

Science

“Science” is short and its letters are unpromising — two e’s, two c’s, one vowel doing most of the lifting. Even so, it gives you niece, scene and seine, a type of fishing net.

It also gives you scenic, which uses six of the seven letters and means something entirely different from the word it came out of.

Forever

Drop one letter from “forever” and you have fever. Rearrange instead and you get fervor, refer and freer.

The three r’s and two e’s are what limit it. Words with repeated letters tend to produce shorter lists, and forever is one of the shortest here.

Service

A sieve lives in “service”, and so does a verse. Neither has any business being there.

The word also yields vices and cries, which read like a warning about bad service but are pure coincidence.

Natural

“Natural” hides altar and ultra, and — like angular — it hides lunar too. Two words on this list, no letters in common with each other, and the moon in both.

There is also aural, which sounds like a word that should be related and is not. 73 words come from natural.

Saffron

The most expensive spice in the world contains arson and sonar. It is difficult to think of three words with less to do with one another.

Both hidden words need the o and the double f has to sit out. All 66 words from saffron are listed in full.

Try it on any word

The trick works on almost anything, which is why it is useful in a classroom. Give a student a seven-letter word and ask for five words inside it; they will read the letters far more carefully than they would when copying a spelling list.

Longer words with varied letters give the biggest lists — angular and natural here — while repeated letters cut the list short, as forever shows. That pattern is the real lesson, and it explains more about English spelling than the individual finds do.