Thursday, December 31, 2009

Semordnilap

We've all heard of palindromes, words that are the same forwards and backwards such as: level, deed, eye, nun, civic.

Palindromes, sure - but I had never heard of a 'semordnilap' before, which is a word that is a completely different word when read backwards, such as:

stressed - desserts
was - saw
deliver - reviled
live - evil

I should mention that neither Webster's dictionary nor Dictionary.com have the word 'semordnilap' in them, but it does come up in numerous wiki pages. According to Wikipedia, the term was coined in 1961 by Dmitri A. Borgmann. Hm.

Semordnilap is supposed to be 'palindrome' backwards, but wouldn't that be emordnilap?

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