I have another question for you pertaining to word plays. If Palindrome is a word, verse or sentence that is the same when read backward or forward (e.g. madam, I’m Adam) and Anagram is a word or phrase made from another word or phrase (in other words, it does NOT include the original word or phrase) by rearranging its letters, in the example of made –> dame, the anagram is DAME, what would you call the following:
Where if you move the first letter to the last space it spells the word backwards? Is it a form of Palindrome? Thanks for your input. Please send responses to kopackorl@corning.com
AFAICT, they are called “asymmetric palindromes”. Believe it or not, the people who seem to use this term most are geneticists, when referring to certain types of gene sequences.
I’m not sure that’s exactly right, but if not, someone will be along soon to correct it!
Dmitri Borgmann, in his book Language on Vacation, coined the term anchored palindrome for this phenomenon. Well, actually, he meant something a little different. His anchored palindromes could have any number of additional letters on one end or the other, but not both. The term isn’t used much and there’s only a handful of Google hits for it.
The longest among common English words, by the way, is sensuousness.
If there are additional letters on both ends, it’s called an internal palindrome. The longest one of these is glycylglycylglycylglycylglycine, a chemical composed of 5 glycine amino acids strung together. This has a 19-letter internal palindrome from the first to last C and a 19-letter anchored palindrome from the first to last G. It’s possible to string an indefinite number of glycines together, so in theory, you can construct indefintely long internal and anchored palindromes. But when they get longer than about 5, chemists tend to stop using the full name and shorten it to gly[sub]6[/sub], gly[sub]7[/sub], etc.