Several years ago I wrote this blog post about a book of word-search puzzles I bought at Sam's. I've still got it, and for the past week I've been solving a puzzle each day. Last night I worked on a puzzle where each word in the list started and ended with the same letter. At one point I found the word SPANK, which was not on the word list. Eventually I realized that spelled backwards it formed the beginning of the word KNAPSACK, which was on the word list. I had never realized that KNAPSACK contained SPANK in reverse.
Which got me thinking, what other words contain words spelled backwards? I looked online to see what I could find, but all the search results were focused on palindromes (words that read the same backward and forward, like "madam") and semordnilaps (words that spell a different word when reversed, like "war" and "raw"). But that wasn't quite what I was looking for. So I did what any nerd would do: I wrote a computer program to figure it out. My Linux system came with a standard dictionary of around 100,000 words, so I used that since it was readily available.
Reading through the results, I was struck by how funny some of the combinations were. Below is a list of some of the more notable ones. The first word on each line contains the second word spelled backwards.
adrenals => nerd aerobic => bore alright => girl anemone => omen benevolence => love whorehouse => hero (I can't stop singing this to the tune of "Juke Box Hero") Episcopalians => snail amoral => aroma asparagus => sugar cardiovascular => avoid chestnuts => stunt cognate => tango cohesion => noise deviant => naive drowsy => sword herons => snore knapsack => spank (proof that my program worked!) lameness => enema lightning => ninth matrons => snort muffins => sniff myriad => dairy nightlife => filth revolt => lover spacecraft => farce strafe => farts televangelist => navel vegetarian => irate weightlifter => filth Tylenol => lonely dairymaid => myriad drawers => reward excitement => emetic (I had to look up emetic -- it means inducing vomiting!) explained => denial partner => entrap werewolf => flower phenomena => anemone sensuousness => sensuous
I can't get over that last example. What are the odds that the word "sensuousness" contains "sensuous" spelled backwards!
Anyway, this was my idea of a fun Friday night.