Palindrome Words: The Complete Guide With Lists

A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards: LEVEL, RADAR, CIVIC. They've fascinated word lovers for centuries, and they turn up in puzzles, trivia and word games. We searched our 275,000-word dictionary to see how many there really are.

The answer: 149 palindromes of three or more letters. That's about one in every 1,800 words. Palindromes are rare because they need a mirror-image structure, which very few English spelling patterns produce naturally.

Common palindrome words

These are the ones most people know, and they appear frequently in everyday English:

Notice that most common palindromes have an odd number of letters. With an odd length, the middle letter stands alone and only the outer pairs need to match. Even-length palindromes need a doubled letter in the very centre (NOON, DEED, REDDER), which is less common.

The longest palindromes in our dictionary

ROTAVATOR, at nine letters, is the longest in our list. It's a British word (originally a trade name) for a motorised garden tiller.

Patterns that create palindromes

Looking through the list, a few patterns stand out:

• RE- words that end in -ER: REFER, REVIVER, REPAPER, REDDER. The prefix RE- mirrors the ending -ER.
• Symmetrical vowel patterns: CIVIC, RADAR, KAYAK, MADAM. Consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant patterns where the outer letters match.
• Doubled letters at the centre: NOON, DEED, PEEP, TOOT.
• Plurals of palindromes ending in S... occasionally: SAGAS, SOLOS and STATS are palindromes because both the word and the S-ending happen to mirror.

Palindrome sentences

Palindromes become more impressive when they span whole sentences. Spaces and punctuation are ignored. Some classics:

• "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama."
• "Was it a car or a cat I saw?"
• "Never odd or even."
• "Madam, in Eden, I'm Adam."
• "Step on no pets."

Creating your own is surprisingly hard. A good method is to start from the middle and work outwards, adding mirror-image letters on each side.

Semordnilaps: words that become other words backwards

A close cousin of the palindrome is the semordnilap ("palindromes" spelled backwards): a word that spells a different word in reverse. Examples:

• STRESSED ↔ DESSERTS
• DRAWER ↔ REWARD
• LIVE ↔ EVIL
• STOP ↔ POTS
• DIAPER ↔ REPAID
• PART ↔ TRAP
• GULP ↔ PLUG

These are useful in word games, because if you can see one, you often have the letters for the other. Every semordnilap pair is also an anagram pair; see how anagram solvers work.

Are palindromes useful in Scrabble?

Not especially for scoring, but they do come up. Short palindromes like TOT, POP, DID and EVE are perfectly normal plays. And if you hold two pairs of matching letters and a single odd tile, it's worth a quick check for a palindrome. KAYAK, for instance, scores well thanks to its two Ks (if you have a blank for the second).

Find palindromes yourself

Our word finder can help you hunt for them. Try setting the same letter for "starts with" and "ends with" and browsing what comes up. Many palindromes, like LEVEL and RADAR, appear in those results.

Related reading

• Words with no vowels
• Words with all five vowels
• Anagram families and how solvers work