Frequently Asked Questions

A semordnilap is a word that forms a completely different valid word when its letters are reversed. For example, "desserts" reversed spells "stressed," and "drawer" reversed spells "reward." The term itself is "palindromes" spelled backwards — a playful nod to the concept.

While "semordnilap" doesn't appear in most major dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary, it is widely used in linguistics, recreational mathematics, and wordplay communities. Other accepted terms for the same concept include "anadrome," "levidrome," "heteropalindrome," and "reversgram." The word was popularized by Dmitri Borgmann in his 1961 book Language on Vacation.

The word "semordnilap" is simply "palindromes" spelled backwards. It was popularized by recreational linguist Dmitri Borgmann in his 1961 book Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities. The self-referential name is itself a form of wordplay — the word describing reversed words is itself a reversed word.

Semordnilaps go by many names: anadrome, emordnilap, levidrome, heteropalindrome, semi-palindrome, half-palindrome, reversgram, mynoreterh, reversible anagram, and word reversal. "Anadrome" is common in academic linguistics, while "levidrome" was coined by a Canadian boy in 2017 and gained media attention. All describe the same phenomenon.

In a sense, yes! "Semordnilap" reversed spells "palindromes" — and since both are recognized words, it functions as a semordnilap. This makes it an autological word — a word that describes itself. The creator intentionally designed it this way as a linguistic inside joke.

A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards (like "racecar" or "madam"), while a semordnilap creates an entirely different word when reversed. For example, "live" reversed is "evil" — two distinct words with different meanings. All semordnilaps involve reversal, but unlike palindromes, the reversed form is never the same as the original.

No — in fact, palindromes and semordnilaps are mutually exclusive by most definitions. A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards ("racecar"), while a semordnilap must form a different word when reversed. A word cannot be both, because it either stays the same (palindrome) or changes (semordnilap). They're two distinct categories of reversible words.

An anagram rearranges letters in any order to form a new word (e.g., "listen" → "silent"), while a semordnilap specifically reverses the letter order (e.g., "live" → "evil"). Every semordnilap is technically an anagram, but most anagrams are not semordnilaps because they don't maintain the strict reversed sequence.

Some of the most well-known semordnilap pairs include: desserts/stressed, evil/live, dog/god, diaper/repaid, drawer/reward, maps/spam, deliver/reviled, doom/mood, war/raw, devil/lived, knits/stink, smart/trams, and straw/warts. Our dictionary contains over 1,149 verified English pairs.

Some of the longest commonly cited semordnilaps include "desserts/stressed" and "deliver/reviled" at 7–8 letters. Longer pairs exist depending on which dictionaries you accept — "rewarder/redrawer" at 8 letters is one example. Our dictionary page lets you sort by word length to explore the longest verified pairs.

Our database contains 1,149 verified English semordnilap pairs, drawn from standard dictionaries. The exact count depends on which dictionaries and word lists you include — some counts go higher when including archaic, technical, or informal words. We also catalog 4,818 cross-language pairs spanning 9 languages.

Several popular names are semordnilaps: Nevaeh ("heaven" reversed, one of the most popular baby names coined this way), Semaj ("James" reversed), and the name pair Aidan/Nadia. In fiction, "Alucard" is famously "Dracula" reversed, used in countless vampire stories and games.

Yes! Oprah Winfrey's production company "Harpo" is "Oprah" reversed. In fiction, the "Mirror of Erised" in Harry Potter is "desire" reversed, and "Yen Sid" in Disney's Fantasia is "Disney" backwards. These aren't traditional semordnilaps (since the reversed forms aren't all dictionary words), but they use the same reversal principle.

Yes! Semordnilaps exist across many languages. Our cross-language database catalogs 4,818 pairs across 9 languages including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, and more. Some pairs even work across languages — where reversing a word in one language produces a valid word in another.

While the term traditionally applies to individual words, some enthusiasts have extended it to phrases. A semordnilap sentence would need every letter reversed to form a new coherent sentence — which is extraordinarily rare. The concept works best at the single-word level, where both the original and reversed forms are established dictionary words.

Absolutely! Since both words in a semordnilap pair are valid dictionary words, they're perfectly legal in Scrabble. Knowing semordnilaps can actually be a strategic advantage — if you can spot that a word on the board has a valid reverse, you might find new placement opportunities. Words like "stressed," "reward," and "evil" are all common Scrabble words.

You can find semordnilaps by reversing words and checking if the result is a valid word. Our dictionary page has a complete searchable database of 1,149 pairs. You can also use our Community Validator tool to test any word pair. For manual discovery, start with short words (3–4 letters) — they're most likely to have valid reversals.

Dmitri Borgmann (1927–1985) was a German-American recreational linguist and author who popularized the term "semordnilap" in his 1961 book Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities. He was a founding member of the National Puzzlers' League and is considered one of the most important figures in recreational linguistics and wordplay scholarship.