palindrome means A word, phrase, number or any other sequence of units which has the property of reading the same forwards as it does backwards, character for character, sometimes disregarding punctuation, capitalization and diacritics. It carries an Arena rating of 1944, earned across 16 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, palindrome ranks #1,290 of 17,130 for Most Ingenious Words, #1,621 of 17,130 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #4,677 of 17,137 for Most Exacting Words, #5,225 of 17,120 for Most Beautiful Words.
palindrome is pronounced /ˈpælɪndɹəʊm/.
Why “palindrome” is a great word
A word, phrase, number, or other sequence of units that reads identically forwards and backwards, character for character. From Ancient Greek παλίνδρομος (palíndromos, "running back again"), from πάλιν (pálin, "back, again") + δρόμος (drómos, "running, course"), first used in English in the 1620s and introduced as a term by Henry Peacham in 1638. Unlike an "anagram," which scrambles letters into new configurations, or a "semordnilap," which yields a different word entirely when reversed, a palindrome is perfect self-symmetry, a linguistic Möbius strip. It is the symmetrical anxiety of "tattarrattat," the quiet, civic promise of "A man, a plan, a canal—Panama," and the digital clock freezing at 12:21—a futile, beautiful resistance to the forward march of time, finding the beginning waiting at the end.
Etymology
From Ancient Greek παλίνδρομος (palíndromos, “running back again”), from πάλιν (pálin, “back, again, back again”) + δρόμος (drómos, “running, race, racecourse”). By surface analysis, palin- + -drome (compare also velodrome and syndrome).
noun
- A word, phrase, number or any other sequence of units which has the property of reading the same forwards as it does backwards, character for character, sometimes disregarding punctuation, capitalization and diacritics.e.g.“The only thing exciting about 2002 is that it's a palindrome.”
- A poetic form in which the sequence of words reads the same in either direction.
- A sequence of items that follows the same pattern both forwards and backwards.
- A stretch of DNA in which the sequence of nucleotides on one strand are in the reverse order to that of the complementary strand
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.
- palindromic 73% match — Of, relating to, or being a palindrome. vs palindrome →
- semordnilap 70% match — A word, phrase, or sentence that has the property of forming another word, phrase, or sentence when its letters are reversed. A semordnilap differs from a palindrome in that the word or phrase resulting from the reversal is different from the original word or phrase. vs palindrome →
- heteropalindrome 69% match — Something that spells something else when reversed, a semordnilap vs palindrome →
- anadrome 68% match — A word which forms a different word when spelled backwards. vs palindrome →
- anacyclic 66% match — palindromic vs palindrome →
- palindromization 63% match — The conversion of a word (or other string of characters) into a palindrome vs palindrome →
- palindromize 63% match — To turn into a palindrome. vs palindrome →
- antipalindromic 62% match — Being equivalent to the object whose constituents or parameters are reversed in order and mapped by some involution, particularly the inversion operator of a quasigroup.; Of a polynomial, being equivalent to the polynomial with reversed and additively inverted coefficients: ∑ᵢ₌₀ⁿa_ixⁱ is antipalindromic iff ∑ᵢ₌₀ⁿa_ixⁱ=∑ᵢ₌₀ⁿ-a_n-ixⁱ⟺a_i=-a_n-i. vs palindrome →