Archive for Palindromes
Elliott notes that he was the one who quoted "A plan, a man, a canam: analpa!" to me, but that he heard it from Geoff Hopcraft, who he thinks originated it. Ranjit writes, "By far the best palindrome book I've found, for its clever original palindromes and quirky drawings, is Ana, Nab a Banana by […]
Everyone knows what a palindrome is: a word that reads the same backwards as forwards (except for spaces and punctuation). Maybe the fact that everyone knows about them is why it's taken me a year and a half to get around to writing about them. The most famous palindrome is probably "Madam, I'm Adam." Perhaps […]
Arthur supplies this switchback ladder: MIRED DENIM LINED DEVIL LIVER REVEL LEVEL LEVER BEVEL There are several other places you can go from LEVER, such as REBEL or RAVEL, but none of them seem to lead anywhere useful. I thought it would be really cool to mirror the ladder through the palindrome—that is, to go […]
There are plenty of words which turn into other words when spelled backward. (No, not when spelled "backward," smart-aleck. When the order of the letters is reversed, okay?) "Straw" turns into "warts," "mart" into "tram," "room" into "moor," "reward" into "drawer." More unusual—or at least less commonly discussed—are words I call "switchbacks": words which turn […]