Friday, March 3, 2017

English Word Palindromes

A palindrome is a number, phrase, sentence, word or character sequence that is the same backwards and forwards. The number 3553 is a number palindrome because it's the same when read in both directions. Here is a list of 20 English word palindromes:

1) civic
2) dad
3) deed
4) did
5) ewe
6) eye
7) huh
8) kayak
9) level
10) madam
11) mom
12) noon
13) nun
14) pop
15) radar
16) refer
17) sagas
18) sees
19) solos
20) wow

Most of the words are monosyllabic (12 out of 20). Besides word palindromes, English also has sentence palindromes. A famous sentence palindrome is Was it a car or a cat I saw? In this sentence palindrome, word boundaries are ignored. The first two words of the question occur in the last three words when it's read backwards.

A palindrome is the same when read from left to right and right to left. It's identical in both directions. Palindromes can be found not only in words but also in phrases and sentences. Malayalam, a language spoken in India, is also a palindrome.

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