Levidrome List FAQs

Those aren't Words

We are only the messenger. We didn't make up any of the words. All words were extracted from the wordlists found on our Dictionary page. NOTE: In our opinion, the insane lists have a lot of "questionable" words.

Extracting words from sources

We extracted the words programmatically. We developed an app or script (in PHP) which does the necessary steps to create the lists. Essentially, we take the list of words, convert to UTF-8 (to standardize so non-english words will show properly on our website), change uppercase to lowercase, remove duplicates, then reverse each word and add it to the existing list. Any duplicates at that point will either be levidromes or palindromes. We remove the palindromes and are left with levidromes.

Levidromes and Pairs

Levidromes are always paired. Having one word in a levidromic pair means you can automatically find the other word simply by reversing the first word. The counts we have listed on our pages are the counts for the words, not the pairs. It was done this way for ease of searching.

Next Step

We are incorporating levidromes for other languages....Check out our List page for other languages to see our progress.

We are also maintaining a chronology of events in our News section.

We are also developing a number of games in our News section.

Learning Experience

It was a learning experience. First, we learned a new word - Levidrome. Second, we learned a lot of "intricacies" about handling international characters and file encodings both for parsing and presentation via a website. Believe me, it was not as straight forward as I initially thought. This was our first dive into developing a website with international characters. Being fairly fluent in PHP I soon found out there were many functions I used routinely which had an UTF counterpart, or more specifically, multibyte safe functions. Some were straight forward, others were not.

Supporting the Cause

To us, Levidrome is already a word. Hopefully creating this website will help make the word "Levidrome" accepted by society and by the dictionaries.