LCNAF (Library of Congress Authority File) has over eleven million names of things ranging from people to geographic locations. I look at this data all the time, and it must have rotted my brain because I started thinking how there were probably a lot of names that if rearranged would spell other names in the file. Turns out there are—in just the personal and corporate categories alone there are over 4000 sets of 5 or more names that all use the same letters to spell themselves. So I pulled those out and made this. Click the button to see another, click the name to view its NAF record. Source code/data. View in its own window.
I really like these sets of anagrammed names because as you read them your brain works really hard to make them relate to each other. You think they are going to rhyme, or find some other rhythm between them but usually there isn’t. But they still feel related subconsciously through their shared N-grams. Combined with the standardization of using inverted order (last name, first) makes reading the list out loud slightly discombobulating.