Games - Palindrome

Home > Listing Index > Games > Palindrome

	Games - Palindrome

: For further examples see Palindromic words and Palindromic phrases : For the movie, see Palindromes (movie)

A palindrome is a word, phrase, number or other sequence of units (such as a strand of DNA) that has the property of reading the same in either direction (the adjustment of punctuation and spaces between words is generally permitted). The word "palindrome" comes from the Greek πάλιν (palin) "back" and δρóμος (dromos) "way, direction". Composing literature in palindromes is an example of constrained writing.

History

According to Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (p. 227): "Palindromes … are at least 2,000 years old". The ancient Greeks often inscribed the palindrome "ΝΙΨΟΝΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑΜΗΜΟΝΑΝΟΨΙΝ" on fountains; in mixed case with modern accents and divided into words this reads "Νίψον ανομήματα μη μόναν όψιν" ("Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin"), meaning "Wash the sins, not face alone" (ps, ψ, is the single Greek letter psi).

The Romans enjoyed palindromes too, as demonstrated by "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" ("We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire"), which was said to describe the behavior of moths. The Latin palindrome "Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas" is remarkable for the fact that it also reproduces itself if one forms a word from the first letters, then the second letters and so forth. Hence it can be arranged into a word square that reads in four different ways: horizontally or vertically from top left to bottom right; and horizontally or vertically from bottom right to top left.

  S A T O R
  A R E P O
  T E N E T
  O P E R A
  R O T A S

Translation is problematic as the word arepo is otherwise unknown; for further discussion, see separate article.

Palindromes in different languages

Palindromes occur in many western languages, but they are particularly prevalent in English due to the wide variety of reversible letter pairs within words. Finnish, however, has been described as "the language of palindromes."

Japanese palindromes, called kaibun, rely on the hiragana syllabary. An example is the word shinbunshi (in syllables shi-n-bu-n-shi), meaning "newspaper". The Japanese syllabary makes it possible to construct very long palindromes.

Chinese palindromes are relatively easy to create due to the structure of written Chinese. For example: 我愛媽媽,媽媽愛我 ("I love Mom; Mom loves me") — usually the first palindrome learned by Chinese children. Numerous palindromes can be created by replacing "媽媽"(Mom) with any person. As a result, only very special palindromes are worth mentioning.

Types of palindrome

:Examples of palindromes are listed at Palindromic words and Palindromic phrases.

Symmetry by characters

The most familiar palindromes, in English at least, are character-by-character: the written characters read the same backwards as forwards. Palindromes may consist of a single word (such as "civic"), a phrase or sentence ("Was it a cat I saw?"), or a longer passage of text. Spaces, punctuation and case are usually ignored.

Symmetry by words

Some palindromes use words as units rather than letters. An example is "You can cage a swallow, can't you, but you can't swallow a cage, can you?".

Symmetry by lines

Still other palindromes take the line as the unit. The poem Doppelganger, composed by James A. Lindon, is an example.

The dialogue "" in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach is nearly a line-by-line palindrome. The second half of the dialog consists, with some very minor changes, of the same lines as the first half, but in reverse order and spoken by the opposite characters (i.e., lines spoken by Achilles in the first half are spoken by the Tortoise in the second, and vice versa). In the middle is a non-symmetrical line spoken by the Crab, who enters and spouts some nonsense, apparently triggering the reversal. The structure is modeled after the musical form known as crab canon, in particular the canon a 2 cancrizans of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Musical Offering
.

Symmetry by sound

Some palindromes are by sound, such as the Hungarian A bátya gatyába ("The brother in underpants"), or the Japanese Ta-ke-ya-bu ya-ke-ta (竹薮焼けた) ("A bamboo grove has been burned").

Numbers

See main article: Palindromic number

Dates and times

Palindromes can also be constructed using dates and times. The exact dates and times may differ according to the local style (for example, whether the month or day is written first). For example:

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Palindrome ]

Searches on eBay

palindrome