Do you know what a Palindrome is? (English)
Aug 14th, 2007 by Julia
A palindrome is a word, phrase, number or sentence that reads the same in either direction.
The word “palindrome” was coined from the Greek roots (palin) “back” and (dromos) “way, direction”.
If you are called Hannah, Bob, Eve or Anna, your name is a palindrome. Backwards or forwards, it is spelled the same way.
Palindromes may consist of a single word: civic, level, rotor, kayak, madam, sexes, radar.
Palindromes may be phrase or sentence: “Was it a rat I saw?”, “Cigar? Toss it in a can. It is so tragic”.
Three famous English palindromes are: ”A man, a plan, a canal—Panama!”, ”Madam, in Eden I’m Adam”, and “Able was I ere I saw Elba” - a phrase purportedly spoken by Napoleon, referring to his first sighting of Elba, the island where the British exiled him.
Other known palindromes are:
fall leaves after leaves fall
Madam, I’m Adam
Never odd or even
No lemon, no melon
Was it a car or a cat I saw?
Level madam, level! is remarkable as not only is it a grammatically correct sentence that is palindromic, but each word in it is also a palindrome.
On the 20th of February 2002 it was 20:02 02/20 2002 Peter Norwig created a computer program which generated the world’s longest palindrome. It consisted of 17,259 words. This is a simple sequence of words, but the text itself makes no sense.
Cool, interesting!
I didn’t know.