Triskaidekadromes

Filed under: Ciphers/Secret Writing
5 Comments

Brian T posted a cryptic crossword clue recently, and Amy H posted the answer but used rot13 to avoid spoiling it for everyone else who might be trying to figure it out.

I thought that was a clever approach. So when Brian posted another clue and I figured out the answer, I decided to post it in rot13 form.

The answer to the clue was the word robe.

If you rot13 robe, you get ebor. Which is robe backwards. Which makes rot13 not a very effective way to conceal the word.

I mentioned this, and Brian came up with the term triskaidekadrome to describe a word which is the same rot13ed as reversed.

And it occurred to me that, given a text file containing a dictionary's worth of words (like the file that in most UNIX systems lives at /usr/dict/words or /usr/share/dict/words), it would be easy to automatically compile a list of all triskaidekadromes.

So I did.

Here's the resulting list, from Webster's Second International, 1934. However, most of the words here aren't in MW3 Unabridged, and some also aren't in Wikipedia and don't have relevant web-search results, which makes me wonder what they were doing in Webster's Second. But maybe they've just fallen out of use in the past 75+ years.

  • an
  • anan (variant of anon)
  • averin (not in MW3. Wikipedia says it's a protein that's like gluten, but I'm not seeing any reliable sources for that)
  • bo (presumably as in “bo tree,” or maybe “bo staff”?)
  • bobo (the only non-proper-noun use I'm finding is a portmanteau for “bourgeois bohemian,” coined in 2000)
  • er
  • gant (French for glove)
  • gnat
  • grivet (a species of monkey)
  • Hu (has various meanings, all proper nouns, unless you count the Chinese word for butterfly)
  • ly (a letter in the Hungarian alphabet, or a suffix or prefix, or various proper nouns)
  • Na (various proper nouns)
  • nana
  • Rane (various proper nouns)
  • ravine
  • re
  • rebore
  • rive
  • robe
  • serf
  • tang
  • thug
  • veri (a couple of proper nouns)

My favorite from that list is ravine. I rather like grivet, too, but not quite as much, just 'cause I had never heard it before.

In case anyone's interested, here's the Perl code I wrote. Should run on most systems, but you may have to change the path to perl in the first line, and/or the path to the words file in the open line.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

open(my $WORDFILE, "<", "/usr/share/dict/web2");

while (my $text = )
{
 chop $text;
 $text = lc $text;
 $text =~ s/[- ]//g;
 my $rot13 = $text;
 $rot13 =~ tr[a-z][n-za-m];
 my $reversed = reverse $text;
 if ($rot13 eq reverse $text)
 {
   print $text . "\n";
 }
}

The line that removes hyphens and spaces isn't strictly necessary for this particular word file; I included that so I could also search the other word file on my computer, which contains hyphenated terms and phrases containing spaces. Sadly, searching that file turned up no triskaidekadromes.

5 Responses to “Triskaidekadromes”

  1. shmuel

    “However, most of the words here aren’t in MW3 Unabridged, and some also aren’t in Wikipedia and don’t have relevant web-search results, which makes me wonder what they were doing in Webster’s Second.”

    My copy of MW2 is at home, and I am not at the moment, so I’ll have to look for these and report back later. With that said, one difference between MW2 and MW3 is that the former had two sets of listings. Most of the page contained the main set of words and definitions, but the bottom inch or so of each page had a smaller-type listing of words that were particularly obscure and/or obsolete. MW3 jettisoned the latter.

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  2. Jed

    Neat! I didn’t know that; thanks for telling me!

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  3. shmuel

    I’ve got Webster’s Second in front of me… let’s see about those words. (They’re capitalized below only because they’re at the start of their respective sentences; I disregarded proper nouns.)

    “Anan” has two definitions in W2: it’s a variant form of “anon”, and a variant form of “anam.” This raises an obvious question, to which the answer is that “anam” means “balinghasay.” Which, in turn, is “A tree (Buchanania arborescens) of the sumac family, yielding an illuminating resin.”

    “Averin” is a Scottish usage, defined as “The cloudberry.”

    “Bo” has several definitions: it’s an obsolete term meaning “both”; it’s an interjection meant to startle (cf. “boo”); it’s a slang term meaning “man, fellow, buddy”; it’s a slang shortening of “hobo”; it’s a Buddhist monk or small boy; it’s a musical note in the obsolete bobization system; and it’s a Burmese military leader.

    “Bobo” has two definitions: “Owala tree.” and “A mullet (Joturus globiceps) of the rivers and cataracts of easter Mexico and Central America.”

    “Gant” has three: in some unspecified dialect it means “yawn; gape”; it’s a dialect variant of “gaunt”; and it’s an obsolete variant of “gannet,” which is a kind of sea bird.

    “Hu” turns out to be a Chinese measure equal to 5 tou or 51.77 liters.

    “Ly” is another Chinese measurement; it’s one thousandth of a thuoc, or .488 milimeters.

    “Na” is obsolete except in Scottish or other dialects of English; in those, it means “no; by no means” or is used as a conjuction meaning either “that… not; nor” or “than.”

    “Nana” is a nursery word for “nurse.”

    “Rane” is a rare Scottish word: as a noun, it means “A rigmarole or jargon of sounds; a long-continued cry or clamor”; as a verb, it’s “to cry or repeat incessantly.”

    “Re”, in addition to being a musical note, means “in or of the thing or matter; in the matter (of), — commonly used prepositionally for in re in business correspondance or in law; as, re your letter of the 3d. instant.” (This may have been obvious to you; I confess I had thought this was an abbreviation for “regard” or “reference” or something.)

    “Veri” is a centipede, in Tahiti.

    Incidentally, the lower section of the page turns out to be for more than just rare and obsolete forms, but I’m not up to summarizing that just now. Have a photo of the explanatory page.

    And here’s a blurry photo of the page with “anan,” so you can see the layout.

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  4. Jed

    That is totally awesome; thanks very much for writing all this up! Made my evening.

    I laughed out loud at the anan->anam->balinghasay bit.

    And I’m delighted by “bobization”; after you mentioned it, I had to go look it up, and found that MW3 describes it as “an obsolete Flemish system of musical solmization using the syllables bo, ce, di, ga, lo, ma, ni.” Bocedigalomani! It sounds like a word for something, but I’m not sure what.

    I guess I knew “na” as Scottish for “no,” and I knew “nana,” and I knew “re,” but all the rest of this is new to me, and delightful.

    Oh, and “rane” is especially excellent.

    I did indeed know that “re” isn’t an abbreviation, but I still have a hard time reminding myself of that; as a kid, I always assumed it was short for “regarding,” and even though I’ve known for something like twenty years that it isn’t, the abbreviation idea still seems so obviously right that I easily forget.

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  5. Jed

    While searching for this entry, I discovered that I came up with the category of triskaidekadromes (but not the name) way back in 1998; there’s a brief list of them at the end of one of my columns. Interestingly, half of the items on that list are phrases rather than single words, so I must have come up with them by hand (either on my own or with others).

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