Results: We Can All Use More (Word) Play!

If you love word play, you're going to love this survey! A palindrome is a word or phrase that is the same forwards and backwards. Some are pretty simple -- DAD is DAD, MOM is MOM, WOW is WOW, and one that we may all know from school (apparently the famous example taught) RACECAR is RACECAR! But some are not as obvious. Have you ever realized that these words were the same forwards and backwards?

The longest palindromic word in the Oxford English Dictionary is Tattarrattat, coined by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) for a knock on the door. The Guinness Book of Records gives the title to Detartrated, the preterite and past participle of detartrate, a chemical term meaning to remove tartrates. But the longest palindrome word in existence isn't in English, but in Finnish -- Saippuakivikauppias (19 letters), which is Finnish for a dealer in lye (caustic soda). Are you someone who enjoys word play?

Words aren't the only things that can be palindromes, sentences can be, too. Historians have found evidence of palindromes from over 1,900 years ago. Here are a few examples -- did you immediately think these were palindromes when seeing them?

A semordnilap ("palindromes" backwards) is a word that becomes a different word when read backwards -- the most famous example of this is GOD becomes DOG, LIVE becomes EVIL, and a favourite of mine, and perhaps of yours, STRESSED becomes DESSERTS. To end this survey, here are some semordnilap that you may not know are so -- were you aware that these are examples of semordnilap?