{"id":13976,"date":"2012-02-10T01:14:40","date_gmt":"2012-02-10T09:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2012\/02\/10\/triskaidekadromes.html"},"modified":"2012-02-10T01:14:40","modified_gmt":"2012-02-10T09:14:40","slug":"triskaidekadromes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2012\/02\/10\/triskaidekadromes\/","title":{"rendered":"Triskaidekadromes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Brian T posted a cryptic crossword clue recently, and Amy H posted the answer but used <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ROT13\">rot13<\/a> to avoid spoiling it for everyone else who might be trying to figure it out.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The answer to the clue was the word <i>robe<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>If you rot13 <i>robe<\/i>, you get <i>ebor<\/i>. Which is <i>robe<\/i> backwards. Which makes rot13 not a very effective way to conceal the word.<\/p>\n<p>I mentioned this, and Brian came up with the term <i>triskaidekadrome<\/i> to describe a word which is the same rot13ed as reversed.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>So I did.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<ul>\n  <li>an<\/li>\n  <li>anan (variant of anon)<\/li>\n  <li>averin (not in MW3. Wikipedia says it's a protein that's like gluten, but I'm not seeing any reliable sources for that)<\/li>\n  <li>bo (presumably as in &ldquo;bo tree,&rdquo; or maybe &ldquo;bo staff&rdquo;?)<\/li>\n  <li>bobo (the only non-proper-noun use I'm finding is a portmanteau for &ldquo;bourgeois bohemian,&rdquo; coined in 2000)<\/li>\n  <li>er<\/li>\n  <li>gant (French for glove)<\/li>\n  <li>gnat<\/li>\n  <li>grivet (a species of monkey)<\/li>\n  <li>Hu (has various meanings, all proper nouns, unless you count the Chinese word for butterfly)<\/li>\n  <li>ly (a letter in the Hungarian alphabet, or a suffix or prefix, or various proper nouns)<\/li>\n  <li>Na (various proper nouns)<\/li>\n  <li>nana<\/li>\n  <li>Rane (various proper nouns)<\/li>\n  <li>ravine<\/li>\n  <li>re<\/li>\n  <li>rebore<\/li>\n  <li>rive<\/li>\n  <li>robe<\/li>\n  <li>serf<\/li>\n  <li>tang<\/li>\n  <li>thug<\/li>\n  <li>veri (a couple of proper nouns)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My favorite from that list is <i>ravine<\/i>. I rather like <i>grivet<\/i>, too, but not quite as much, just 'cause I had never heard it before.<\/p>\n<p>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 <code>open<\/code> line.<\/p>\n<pre>\n#!\/usr\/bin\/perl\nuse strict;\nuse warnings;\n\nopen(my $WORDFILE, \"&lt;&quot;, &quot;\/usr\/share\/dict\/web2&quot;);\n\nwhile (my $text = )\n{\n chop $text;\n $text = lc $text;\n $text =~ s\/[- ]\/\/g;\n my $rot13 = $text;\n $rot13 =~ tr[a-z][n-za-m];\n my $reversed = reverse $text;\n if ($rot13 eq reverse $text)\n {\n   print $text . \"\\n\";\n }\n}\n<\/pre>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ciphers-secret-writing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}