Levidrome News

Happy Levidrome Day 1202 2021

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Levidrome Date

Today is December 2, 2021. If we have a date format of mm/dd/yyyy, a common and popular date format, today would be written as 12/02/2021

Remove the slashes and we get 12022021 - a palindrome.

However with a space inserted between the mmdd combination and the year we can also get 1202 2021 - which is a levidromic pair.

The dictionaries include numbers as part of the definition of palindrome.

So the combinations 12022021 and 1202 2021 are definitely palindromic.

However, there is a bit of a debate whether numbers are consider words as well.

Since an official definition does not yet exist for levidromes, I would suggest that numbers could fall into its definition as well. After all, the number 1202 is a different valid number compared to 2021.

To be safe, we have included numbers into our definition of a levidrome which you can see on our main page. It only makes sense. Dictionaries may argue but we will let them sort that out and we will adjust our definition at that time.


This will be the last levidromic or palindromic date of the year.

Happy Levidrome Day! Oh, and also, Happy Palindrome Day!



Operation Levidrome 2 - Photoshopbattles Reddit - Winners

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Operation Levidrome 2 - Photoshopbattles Reddit

Operation Levidrome 2 on reddit's photoshopbattles ran for 2 weeks between October 14 to October 28, 2021. There were 9 creative submissions to the contest. Below are the winners for the first, second and third places. Note: Being part of the photoshopbattles community, we submitted 3 of entries as well, one of which was the rats-star entry ("tied for third place").

The first levidrome contest ran 3 years ago in 2018. Photoshopbattles is a popular subreddit with now 17.4 million viewers. Levidrome appearing again gained a ton of recognition by many of these viewers as the Operation's Battle is one of the first 2 listed on their main page. Thanks to the photoshopbattles community for having a Levidrome 2 operation!

Enjoy viewing the first, second and third place submissions. (The remainder of the submissions can be seen at Operation Levidrome 2 : photoshopbattles).

First Place - Wolf==Flow
Operation Levidrome 2 - First Place

Second Place - Switchup (Paws==Swap)
Operation Levidrome 2 - Second Place

Third Place - Cod==Doc
Operation Levidrome 2 - Third Place

Levidromes - not just words!



Operation Levidrome 2 - Photoshopbattles Reddit

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Operation Levidrome 2 - Photoshopbattles Reddit

Levidrome is hitting Reddit again in the Photoshopbattles community. They ran their first Levidrome Operation in September, 2018 and it was very popular.

Once again, it will be really fun to see the entries of their Levidrome 2 Operation. Levidromes in pictures, and knowing the photoshopbattle community, there will be some pretty creative pictures. Part of the fun will also be to vote for the best image.

Wait! What am I doing writing about the contest when I have to create an entry! I'm off. Stay tuned for more later. Exciting times!



Levidrome - Birthday Number 4

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Happy 4th Birthday Levidrome

Today marks the 4th birthday for the initial Levidrome video posted by Levi and his father.

In the past, we celebrated by creating a card (or image actually) using some online billboard making sites. This year, we created a simple birthday card from a site called Happy.Birthday-To-You.com".

At Happy.Birthday-To-You.com, you can create some really simple birthday cards for free. Once created, you just simply copy the URL of the card and send it via social media, mail, text or whatever.

It does the job really well.

The levidromic journey continues. We are still doing our part keeping the word alive. It is easy to do, but also kind of hard because levidrome is not a word which comes up in normal conversations.

Happy 4th Birthday Levidrome.



Levidromes and Ambigrams

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Levidrome Ambigram

Back in January, 2019, we wrote an article about Billidromes. It was suggested by William Shatner as a parody on the word "levidrome".


What Shatner created was a ambigram. The definition of an ambigram is something (such as an image of a written word or phrase) that is intended or able to be oriented in either of two ways for viewing or reading.

The above spinning image is the word Levidrome displayed as an ambigram.


Here is the same image for those who are "spinning challenged", like me.


Stationary Levidrome Ambigram


It was created at Free Online Ambigram Generator (minus the spinning part). Really easy to create ambigrams at this site. Bunch of different fonts to change things up a bit.

The really cool part about this site is it not only allows you to create ambigrams from a single word, but also from pairs of words of equal length.

I can almost hear what you are thinking.....


Oh! Oh! Levidromes! They are pairs of words with equal lengths!


It was almost as though ambigrams were made for levidromes.

Here is an example of a 2 word ambigram - Wolf and Flow.

Here is the levidromic word - wolf...


Wolf Levidrome Ambigram


And when rotated 180 degrees, it's levidromic pair - flow...


Flow Levidrome Ambigram


Pretty cool, huh?

But the coolness doesn't stop there.

You see, ambigrams were first used in 1984. So approximately 37 years ago. If you google ambigram and dictionary, you may come across an article from Merriam-Webster about Words we are watching. Ambigram was on the dictionaries watch list.

A familiar tone? There was an addendum to the article stating ambigram made it into the dictionaries in September of 2020!

Levidromes are following the same path as ambigrams. It is currently on their watch list.

Hopefully we won't have to wait 37 years for it to become recognized, but who knows. Patience is a virtue?


Hang in there levidrome. We've got this.



Levidrome Article - Capital News

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Capital Daily

We have stumbled upon a really good article about levidromes by Emily Fagan from Capital Daily. The article was published on July 16, 2021 so we updated our chronology (this News section) with the same date, even though we discovered the article on July 27, 2021. The summary title of the article is "A Victoria 10-year-old created a word for a linguistic oddity. Over the past four years, it's come to means so much more."

It is a really good read. A good summary of what levidrome means to some people.

As usual, spread the word.



Levidrome VR Games

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Levidrome VR Games

Break out your VR headsets, because Levidromes have just gone virtual.

For Christmas, we received a VR Headset from Santa. An Oculus Quest 2! Really cool! Thanks Santa! It was just a matter of time before we started to develop something.

Well the time has come.

I wanted to develop something which would work across everything - web, VR Headsets, mobile...you name it.

We had previous built a number of Web-based levidrome games (Memory Match, Emag, Puzzle). Emag (which is the levidromic pair for "game") was developed in Unity and it only works well on a desktop browser. Although Unity can support VR headsets it also had a steeper learning curve (so our version does not have VR support at this time because we developed it before we had a VR headset).

We decided to work with good ol' HTML. And thanks to https://aframe.io, we have the perfect framework. A-FRAME allows developers to create 3D experiences for Virtual Reality headsets using HTML. Also A-FRAME has built-in support for all major VR headsets and devices. It works with all major browsers, google cardboard and VR headsets by default. If you own a headset without a hand controller it uses the "gaze" technique for clicking on the cards.

Levidrome VR Game Easy

If this is your first experience with VR on a mobile device, it is a bit different. You don't click on items directly. You would move the scene over the cursor (the black circle in the middle), then "gaze" for about 1 second. If you have a controller with your headset it should show up as a laser pointer to select your card.

So strap on your VR headset and join the play area with a layout of 16 cards and test out your memory.

So without further ado, here are the latest game additions to our collection - Levidrome VR Memory Match games!


There is an easy version of the VR Memory match game and a hard version of the game. Also since this is VR, we added an extra twist to the game.


Have fun! And as usual, spread the word!

If you have any suggestions or things are not working properly, let us know in the contact us section. Levidromes rule!



Levidrome Poetry

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Levidrome Poetry

A fellow levidromist pointed me in this direction for this article - poetry. Not just poetry, but levidromic poems.

Seth W Thatcher created a couple of poems. They can be seen at this twitter location, but I will copy them here for easier viewing:


Poem 1 (untitled) - Published - November 25, 2017

Regal lager
and DNA
pool loop.
Devil lived
on no
Sleep. Peels
stink. Knits
net. Ten
edit tide.
God dog
won now.



Poem 2 (untitled) - Published April 9, 2021

Ew. We
live evil
eh? he
slap pals,
lag gal,
yap pay.

Gut tug.

Ah ha!
God, dog.
Evil live
on? No.
Sit. ‘Tis
He.
Eh?



Really great job Thatcher!

Keep the levidromes alive! If there are other poets out there, especially levidromic poets, please feel free to contact us and we can publish additional poems.



Levidromes - Our Secret Sauce

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Levidrome List Secret Sauce

When we first started this website, we wanted to publish all known levidromes. We started with English, then expanded to other languages. We have achieved that goal for all the dictionary lists we have found.

We probably took the fun out of trying to find new levidromes. All you have to do is visit our list pages and there they are. But how did we find them?

A bit of a hint. When we created our FAQ page, we actually went through the process of how our levidrome finding script worked. But today, we are going to reveal the actual script. Our secret sauce in our finding levidromes recipe.

The script was developed in PHP, a programming language which is used highly in web environments. Wordpress, one of the the most popular Web development tools used today, is written in PHP.

Although highly used on the web, PHP is still a programming language which can take data as input and spit out results as output. I am very familiar with the language and it has a bunch of built in functions which handle arrays (or lists) beautifully.

To quote what we said on our FAQ page:

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.

That was basically the procedure or method to our goal. The only pre-work which had to be done was to ensure the list of words was in UTF-8 format (which is a format which can display foreign characters). Our DICT words lists are already in this format.

Here is the script (using tagalog as an example):

<?php
ini_set("memory_limit","-1");
$langfile="tagalog";
function array_not_unique( $a = array() )
{
 return array_diff_key( $a , array_unique( $a ) );
}
function mb_strrev($string, $encoding = null) {
 if ($encoding === null) {
  $encoding = mb_detect_encoding($string);
}

$length = mb_strlen($string, $encoding);
$reversed = '';
while ($length-- > 0) {
  $reversed .= mb_substr($string, $length, 1, $encoding);
}

return $reversed;
}
$f1=fopen($langfile."-levidrome.txt",'a');
$f2=fopen($langfile."-palindrome.txt",'a');
$words=file($langfile,FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES);
$rev=array();
for($i=0;$i<=sizeof($words)-1;$i++){
  $words[$i]=mb_strtolower($words[$i],"UTF-8");
  $rev[$i]=mb_strrev($words[$i],"UTF-8");
}
$words=array_unique($words);
$rev=array_unique($rev);
$all=array_merge($words,$rev);
sort($all);
$uniq=array_not_unique($all);
foreach($uniq as $word){
  if(mb_strrev($word,"UTF-8")<>$word){
    fwrite($f1,$word."\n");
  }else{
    fwrite($f2,$word."\n");
}
}
fclose($f1);
fclose($f2);
?>

So there you have it. Once the script is run, you will have 2 files, one with levidrome words and the other with palindrome words. The secret sauce or coding which we used to created our lists.

Aside note: Most instances of PHP by default do not have the MBSTRING functions enabled. You may need to add these features to your PHP install by either downloading the extensions, or enabled them in the php.ini file by uncommenting the extension=php_mbstring.dll line.

I apologize in advance. This was probably the most geeky post I have ever written for this website. However, that is me...geeky...but also a levidromist geek.



Happy Levidrome Day 2021

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Levidrome Date

Today is February 12, 2021. If we have a date format of dd/mm/yyyy, which is quite common in the banking industry as well as many countries of the world, today would be written as 12/02/2021

Remove the slashes and we get 12022021 - a palindrome.

However with a space inserted between the mmdd combination and the year we can also get 1202 2021 - which is a levidromic pair.

The dictionaries include numbers as part of the definition of palindrome.

So the combinations 12022021 and 1202 2021 are definitely palindromic.

Since an official definition does not yet exist for levidromes, I would deduce that numbers could fall into its definition as well. After all, the number 1202 is a different valid number compared to 2021.

To be safe, we have included numbers into our definition of a levidrome which you can see on our main page. It only makes sense. Dictionaries may argue but we will let them sort that out and we will adjust our definition at that time.


How frequent are these levidrome days?

Previous to this millenium, the last levidrome dates were in the year 1380 (Aug 31, 1380).

When the year 2001 started, they started to show up again, usually 4 per decade.

This year, there will be 2 levidrome days - February 12th and December 2nd.

Next year in 2022, there will only be one. February 22nd (2202 2022)

We crunched the numbers. Between now and the year 2190, there will be levidromic dates in the early part of each decade, ie. years ending in either 0, 1 or 2.

So basically 3 to 4 levidrome dates per decade during this time frame.

After the year 2220 there will be 1 to 2 occurrences per decade.

However, after the year 2290 there will not be another occurrence for centuries.

Levidromic days will not be showing up again until the year 3001, over 700 years later. So enjoy them when they are here. They are relatively rare and will become even more rare in the future.

Happy Levidrome Day! Oh, and also, Happy Palindrome Day!



Some Additional Languages Added

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Levidrome List Logo

Our first post of the new year. Happy New Year to all.

We have added a really old language as well as a really new language.

First the old language - Arabic

It has been around for a really long time. I found a pretty decent list of words online, so I have added the list to our dictionary section as well as finding the arabic levidromes and the palindromes.

Now for the next language - Esperanto. This is a somewhat new and rare language. It has only been around since 1887 and its purpose is to be a constructed language, or a international auxiliary language. Here are the Esperanto levidromes and the palindromes.

With these two languages added, this makes our dictionaries total 18,232,479 words, with 32,786 levidromes and 3,909 palindromes.

As always, if there is a language you would like to see added, let us know. It is easy to create the lists...It is just more difficult getting decent dictionary file of words.