Palindromes, Reversals and Record-Breaking Anagrams

Some words are useful, and some are just delightful. Palindromes read the same in both directions. Some words spell a completely different word backwards. And a few sets of letters can be rearranged into a remarkable number of real words. This article rounds up the best examples, checked against the TWL06 and Collins Scrabble lists, and explains why playing with these curiosities quietly improves your word-game skills.

Palindromes: same forwards and backwards

A palindrome is a word that reads the same in both directions. Everyday examples are easy to name: LEVEL, KAYAK, RADAR, CIVIC, MADAM, REFER. Finding long ones is harder than you might expect. Across the whole TWL06 list there are only 39 palindromes of five letters or more.

The longest palindromes in TWL06

A few of these need explaining. HALALAH is a monetary unit of Saudi Arabia. A REIFIER is someone who treats an abstract idea as if it were a concrete thing. MARRAM is a coastal grass, a TERRET is a ring on a horse's harness, and SEMEMES are units of meaning in linguistics.

Collins goes further

Collins Scrabble Words, the international list, includes several longer palindromes:

• ROTAVATOR (9 letters): a machine for breaking up soil, and the longest palindrome in either list
• HADEDAH (7): a South African ibis, named for its call
• SEITIES (7): the plural of SEITY, a quality peculiar to oneself

The famous ones that do not count

Some of the best-known palindromes are missing from both lists. RACECAR is usually written as two words, so it is not valid. REDIVIDER and TATTARRATTAT (a word James Joyce coined for a knock on a door) are too obscure even for Collins. Long palindromic sentences, such as the classic about a man, a plan and a canal, are a different hobby altogether.

Reversals: words that spell other words backwards

A semordnilap (palindromes spelled backwards) is a word that becomes a different word when reversed. Short ones are everywhere: STOP and POTS, LIVE and EVIL, DRAW and WARD. Long ones are rare.

The longest reversal pairs in TWL06 have eight letters:

Seven-letter pairs include DELIVER and REVILED, GATEMAN and NAMETAG, STINKER and REKNITS, and DEIFIER and REIFIED. Among six-letter pairs, DRAWER and REWARD, DIAPER and REPAID, ANIMAL and LAMINA, and PUPILS and SLIPUP are favourites.

Anagrams: the most rearrangeable letters

An anagram rearranges every letter of a word into a new word: LISTEN becomes SILENT, ENLIST, TINSEL and INLETS. Some letter sets are far more flexible than others. Here are the champions in TWL06 at each length:

Notice the letters these sets share: A, E, R, S and T appear in almost all of them. Those are among the most common letters in English, and they combine in so many ways that they act like a universal adapter. This is no coincidence for Scrabble players: the same letters make the best bingo racks.

The longest anagram pairs

At the other extreme are long words that have exactly one partner. The longest pairs in TWL06 are fifteen letters, the maximum length the list allows:

• ALGORITHMICALLY and LOGARITHMICALLY
• ELECTROMAGNETIC and MAGNETOELECTRIC
• MICROPHOTOGRAPH and PHOTOMICROGRAPH
• TASTELESSNESSES and STATELESSNESSES

ALGORITHMICALLY and LOGARITHMICALLY are the most elegant of the group: two everyday mathematical words that happen to use the same fifteen letters.

Anagrams with a sense of humour

Some anagrams feel like the letters are making a joke. DORMITORY can be rearranged into the phrase "dirty room", and ASTRONOMER into "moon starer". Those phrases are not single words, so they would not score in Scrabble, but they show how much fun rearranging letters can be. If you enjoy multi-word anagrams, try our phrase anagram solver.

Why curiosities make you a better player

It is tempting to treat lists like these as trivia, but they train exactly the skills word games reward.

• Anagram sets build rack vision. Once you know that AEPRS makes twelve words, you start seeing PARSE, SPARE and SPEAR in your rack without effort. Learning the big anagram families is one of the fastest ways to find more plays.
• Reversals and palindromes sharpen letter awareness. Reading words backwards forces you to look at individual letters instead of the shape of the word, which is the same skill you use when a crossword answer suddenly falls into place.
• Unusual words become playable words. MARRAM, TERRET and ALULA are not words you will use in conversation, but each one is a legal play that might rescue an awkward rack.

Our article on how anagrams make you better at word games explains the training side in more depth, and the bingo racks built from the letters above are covered in the best Scrabble bingo stems.

Try it yourself

Pick any word and see what else its letters can make with the anagram solver, or test your speed against the clock in Anagram Sprint. You might discover a new favourite pair of your own.