Company Anagrams

Inspiration: My brain is a jumble of parenting, tech news and word games. One day in my boredom I thought about the company name Vercel. It seemed odd, and I wondered where that name came from. Then realized Vercel is an anagram of clever. I can't verify if that was intentionally done by their hired branding agency? But it made me wonder about other companies.

Description: To figure out if other companies were anagrams like this, I pulled together some data sources and filtered for (ideally / mostly) companies people actually recognize. The list is biased towards tech: the 1,000 largest US-listed companies by market cap from the SEC, companies with articles on 25 or more Wikipedias from Wikidata, Y Combinator's top companies, and a handful of other sources.

Method: English words come from SCOWL's standard-size dictionary, filtered out if they're not in the 70,000 most common words in Peter Norvig's counts from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus.

Appendix

Acer

care, race, acre

Adobe

abode

Agilent

gelatin

Aldi

dial, laid

ASML

slam

Atari

tiara

Atlassian

assailant

Atmel

metal

Braun

urban

Carlyle

clearly

Cartier

erratic

Carvana

caravan

Converse

conserve

Cray

racy

DICE

iced

DirecTV

verdict

Docker

rocked

Elsevier

relieves

Ericsson

necrosis

ESET

tees

Esri

rise, sire

Fendi

fined, fiend

Fila

fail

Framer

farmer

Garmin

margin, arming

Geely

elegy

GOAT

toga

Grab

brag, garb

Hinge

neigh

Intel

inlet

Lacoste

lactose, locates

Lego

ogle

Lever

revel

Lidl

dill

Maersk

makers

Mango

among

Mars

arms, rams

Meta

team, meat, mate, tame

Naver

raven

Neon

none

Nespresso

responses

Nexon

xenon

Opel

pole

Palm

lamp

Pearson

persona

Pontiac

caption

Porsche

porches

Proton

pronto

Ramp

pram

Red Hat

thread, hatred, dearth

Redfin

friend, finder

Renault

neutral

Replit

triple

Resend

sender, denser

Ricoh

choir

Scion

coins, icons, sonic

SEAT

east, eats

Sharp

harps

Siemens

nemesis

Signal

aligns

Singer

resign, reigns, signer

Slack

lacks

Sony

nosy

Sprint

prints

Staples

pastels

Stripe

priest, sprite

Supreme

presume

Tecmo

comet

Tesla

least, tales, steal, slate, stale

United

untied

Velcro

clover

Vercel

clever

Verisign

revising

Vespa

paves

Vimeo

movie

Wayfair

fairway

Wired

weird, wider

Sources

Wikidata

SEC EDGAR company tickers

Y Combinator companies (yc-oss)

SCOWL word lists, Kevin Atkinson

Natural Language Corpus Data, Peter Norvig

Crossword Heatmap