19 Palindromes You Might Not Know

What is a palindrome?

A palindrome is a word that runs both ways—literally. The original Greek meaning of the word is “running back again,” from palin meaning “back” or “again” and -dromos, from the Greek verb meaning “to run.” (Think of a word like hippodrome, where horse racing occurs, from the Greek words for “horse” and “running.”)

Like a horse race, a palindrome takes a single element of the nature of something and makes it the singular focus of attention: for horses, it’s speed; for words, it’s spelling.

There are a few famous phrase palindromes like “Madam in Eden, I’m Adam” and “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” but probably none so well known as “A man, a plan, a canal—Panama.” Our Unabridged edition of 1934 used the moralistic “Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel” as an example, although this one depends on the spelling convention of the early 17th century to spell dwell with only one l.

English spelling is notoriously arbitrary and only sometimes phonetic, and these irregularities make the symmetry of palindromes rare and oddly satisfying. Individual words that can be spelled the same way backwards and forwards seem to have a certain magic to them: they ring true every time.

Let’s look at a few.