Some words do not care which way you read them. LEVEL, RADAR and KAYAK come out the same in both directions. Others turn into a different word entirely: read STRESSED backward and you get DESSERTS, which is either a coincidence or very good advice.
We went through the JumbleFix word list to find every word that reads the same both ways, and every pair of words that spell each other backward. There are more of both than you might expect.
Palindromes: 100 of them
A palindrome reads the same forward and backward. Counting words of three letters or more, the list has 100:
- 3 letters: 50, including DAD, DID, EYE, EVE, EWE, GAG, MOM, NUN, POP, PUP, TOT, WOW and YAY.
- 4 letters: 13, including DEED, NAAN, NOON, PEEP, SEES and TOOT.
- 5 letters: 23, including CIVIC, KAYAK, LEVEL, MADAM, RADAR, REFER, ROTOR, SOLOS, STATS and TENET.
- 6 letters: 7: DENNED, HALLAH, MARRAM, PULLUP, REDDER, SELLES and TERRET.
- 7 letters: 7: DEIFIED, HALALAH, REIFIER, REPAPER, REVIVER, ROTATOR and SEMEMES.
The seven-letter palindromes are the longest in the list. A few need an introduction. HALALAH is a small unit of Saudi money, a hundredth of a riyal. REPAPER is what you do when the first wallpaper did not take. SEMEMES are units of meaning, which is fitting for a word that means the same thing both ways. And ROTATOR, appropriately, turns around without changing.
Half of all the palindromes are three letters long, and that is no accident. A three-letter palindrome only needs its first and last letters to match. Every extra pair of letters is another match the word has to make, so palindromes get rarer fast as they get longer.
Backward words: 420 pairs
The more surprising find is the number of words that become a different word when reversed. Language lovers call these semordnilaps, which is "palindromes" spelled backward, naturally. The list has 420 such pairs of three letters or more:
- 8 letters: 2 pairs, DESSERTS and STRESSED, and REDRAWER and REWARDER.
- 7 letters: 6 pairs, including DELIVER and REVILED, and GATEMAN and NAMETAG.
- 6 letters: 42 pairs, including ANIMAL and LAMINA, DIAPER and REPAID, and DRAWER and REWARD.
- 5 letters: 86 pairs, including DEVIL and LIVED, DENIM and MINED, KNITS and STINK, LAGER and REGAL, DECAF and FACED, KEELS and SLEEK, STRAW and WARTS, and SMART and TRAMS.
- 4 letters: 149 pairs, including DRAW and WARD, LIVE and EVIL, STAR and RATS, STOP and POTS, BRAG and GARB, and AVID and DIVA.
- 3 letters: 135 pairs.
Some of these pairs feel like they were written by a comedian. DESSERTS is the cure for STRESSED. A DIAPER is how a debt gets REPAID, at least in the early years. LIVE spelled backward is EVIL, which explains a great deal about Monday mornings.
The S pattern behind many pairs
Look at that list again and you will see a lot of S: STOP and POTS, STAR and RATS, KNITS and STINK, STRESSED and DESSERTS. That is the single biggest pattern in the data. 177 of the 420 pairs, or 42%, have an S at the end of one word and the start of the other.
The reason is plurals. English adds S to the end of a word to make it plural, and a huge number of English words start with S. So whenever a plural like POTS reverses into a word that starts with S, you get a pair for free. The S is doing double duty: plural on one side, first letter on the other.
That gives you a handy trick. If you want to find a backward pair, take a word that starts with S and see whether its reverse is a plural. STAB becomes BATS, SNUB becomes BUNS, SPOT becomes TOPS, SLEEK becomes KEELS.
Why this is useful at the board
Palindromes and reversals are mostly for fun, but they turn up in games more than you would think.
- In Jumble and anagram puzzles, a reversal pair is a special kind of anagram: the same letters in the opposite order. If a scramble happens to be one word backward, the answer is often its partner.
- In crosswords, clues like "reversed" or "back" usually point to exactly these pairs. Knowing that LAGER reverses to REGAL can crack a clue in seconds.
- In Scrabble, a word and its reversal use the same tiles, so if one does not fit a hook on the board, the other might.
To explore any word's anagrams, including its reversal, try the anagram solver, or open a word like STRESSED to see its full entry.
How we counted
We started from the ENABLE word list, a public-domain list used by many word games (172,823 words), and kept the 155,976 words that are also active on JumbleFix. A palindrome is a word of three letters or more that reads the same in both directions. A reversal pair is two different words of three letters or more where each is the other spelled backward; each pair is counted once.
Written by Morty Leonid with AI assistance. Every count in this article comes from queries against the JumbleFix word list.