Palindromes

Palindromes are fascinating beasts. Imagine running a race on a cross-country course. Immediately after the start, you passed through a forest, then a desert where a giraffe cheered you on, and ended on a beach by the ocean. At what you thought was the finish line, the race director said you had to turn around and run back the way you came to complete the race. So you ran the course backwards and saw first the exact same forest, then the giraffe in the desert, and finished at the beach. Puzzled, you turned around and looked back. The beach was gone and the forest beckoned.

That's what makes palindromes magical. Read it through normally, left to right, and it makes sense. Then flip it around in reverse, and read the exact same thing. As if that wasn't crazy enough, our genes contain palindromes, over ten million of them!

A palindrome can be simple, wearing its symmetry proudly like a Mardis Gras costume. Another might be subtle and deceptive, appearing as an ordinary sentence, only to reveal its mirror nature with a flourish. Every palindrome is a spider walking across a mirror, existing on the invisible boundary between reality and wonderland. The spider palindrome lives on each side simultaneously, like Alice in her looking glass worlds.

From 79 AD, in Pompeii, comes the Sator Square, the earliest documented palindrome. Remarkably, this construction of five five-letter Latin words is also a two-dimensional palindrome. Latin scholars have found many other palindromes. It seems people have enjoyed word play for about two thousand years or more.

Palindromes are fun to read, but devilishly hard to write. I tried for years and never got past two-word palindromes. That's where my Palindromedary comes in.

The palindrome collection on palindromedary.us is unique. At first, the palindromes came from members. Now that I am no longer accepting submissions, I am looking at gathering palindromes from other sources, like selected websites and the palindromes sub-reddit.