Was it a rat I saw? Yo, banana boy! Mr Owl ate my metal worm. Perhaps these sound like the ravings of a mad person, but in case you haven’t figured it out, these are palindromes: words or phrases that can be read the same way in either direction.
Palindromes are interesting little things with a long and illustrious history dating back to 79AD. Around this time, a Latin word square was discovered buried in volcanic ash in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum with the words ‘Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas’ (the farmer/sower, Arepo, sows the seeds). The words within the square could be read horizontally or vertically from either top left to bottom right or bottom right to top left.
Even though these funky little phrases were around in ancient Roman times, the word ‘palindrome’ was not used to describe them until the English writer Ben Johnson coined the phrase in the 1600s. It’s derived from the Greek words palin (‘again’) and dromos (‘direction’).
Single word palindromes include radar, level, madam, kayak and dewed. Even ‘I’ and ‘a’ qualify, and if you’re called Hannah, you probably already know that your name is also part of this unique collection of words. The longest palindrome recorded is a sentence consisting of 17,259 words.
Neither spaces nor punctuation are usually taken into consideration when constructing palindromes, which makes life easier. So why not get creative and give it a go yourself? You may come across an ‘evil olive’ or two or discover you’re as ‘mad as Adam’.





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