What is a palindrome?
Quick answer
A palindrome is a word, phrase, number or other sequence that reads the same backward as forward, such as racecar, level, noon and madam. In phrases, spaces and punctuation are usually ignored, as in “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” The word comes from Greek palin (“again”) and dromos (“running”).
The term was coined in English in the early 1600s, though people were writing palindromes in ancient times. A Latin palindrome, “Sator Arepo tenet opera rotas,” was found scratched into a wall at Pompeii, arranged in a square that reads the same in four directions.
Kinds of palindromes
| Type | Examples |
|---|---|
| Words | kayak, civic, radar, refer, rotor, stats |
| Phrases | “Never odd or even,” “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” |
| Names | Hannah, Anna, Otto, Bob |
| Numbers | 121, 1331, 12321 |
| Dates | 02/02/2020 (both day-first and month-first) |
Record holders
- “Tattarrattat”: coined by James Joyce in Ulysses for a knock on a door; it’s often called the longest palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary.
- “Saippuakivikauppias”: a Finnish word for a soapstone seller, 19 letters long.
- “Redivider” is one of the longest everyday English palindromic words.
Palindromes in nature
- DNA contains palindromic sequences, where a stretch of one strand reads the same as the matching strand in the opposite direction. Many enzymes cut DNA at exactly these spots.
- In music, some composers wrote pieces that sound the same played backward.
A word that is the reverse of another
When a word spelled backward makes a different word, like stressed/desserts or live/evil, it’s called a semordnilap, which is “palindromes” spelled backward.
Other wordplay terms are explained in what a homophone is and what an acronym is.
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