Have you ever had an "AH HA!" moment? The moment when the light bulb goes on? The moment or instant at which the solution to a problem or other significant realization becomes clear. Sudden insight. Well, that was a levidrome moment.

You see, "ah" is a levidrome of "ha". Short. Sweet. To the point. In fact, it is our favourite levidromic pair. There aren't many levidrome pairs which can stand out in a sentence on their own. "AH HA" is one of them. To give them proper emphasis, it is recommended to capitalized both words, and maybe surrounding them in quotes.

Now, you may be thinking, "AH HA" should actually be spelled "aha". And you know what...you're right! There is the "aha moment". Although aha has been around for years, it was only added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary a mere 6 years ago, with respect to the definition of an "aha moment". In 2012, largely thanks to Oprah Winfrey's use of the phrase, "Aha moment" made it into the dictionary. Aha was formed by combining the two words "Ah" and "Ha".

Ironically a pair of levidromes gave birth to a palindrome. AH + HA = AHA.

If Oprah can get a word into the dictionary, so can we. One interesting bit of information is Oprah had also created a levidrome of her own. "Oprah" spelled backwards is "Harpo". Harpo Productions is the multimedia production company founded by Oprah.

Hmmm, if we could only get Oprah on board, levidrome would be a shoe in.

Cindy E. Harnett published an article in the Times Colonist titled "Latest word on levidrome: Oxford says it's not ready, but linguist begs to differ". In the article, she mentions that Oxford Dictionaries is not seeing a lot of natural use of levidrome.

The article consults an associate linguistics professor from the University of British Columbia. He states that natural use of levidrome is a tall order.

And we would agree.

When someone comes across a levidrome, or a palindrome, it is not as though s/he will actively tell the world about it. It would be more of a thought than a broadcast. It would be more of a "oh cool, that's a levidrome" - and life goes on.

In the article, it goes on by saying there are other proposed words with the same meaning as levidrome, such as antigram, heterodrome, or semordnilap. However these words haven't stuck. No websites dedicated to those words, unlike levidromes at https://www.levidromelist.com.

Natural use is going to be pretty hard for a somewhat obscure word in rarely used scenarios. Databases, which Oxford would use to determine word popularity and longevity, only work with written words or "published writings". So the more tweets or articles about levidromes the better. Spread the word.

So for now, levidrome ends up in the seldom used category with words like acnestis (part of your back you cannot scratch), meldrop (a drop of mucus at the nose) or octothorpe (the hash tag { # }).

The wait shall continue, and #levidrome (octothorpe levidrome).

Operation Levidrome on reddit's photoshopbattles ran for 2 weeks between September 27 to October 10, 2018. There were 17 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 a couple of entries as well which were the rats-star entry (we'll call that one an "honourable mention") and the peed-deep entry (we won't mention that one again).

This shows that even though levidromes are words, many times those words could be represented by pictures and images. And anytime there is a picture and a community like photoshopbattles which loves to do stuff with pictures and images, well that's just a recipe for having fun.

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

First Place - dab=bad


Second Place - pooh hula hoop slam dunk pooh on a hoop


Third Place - Omen==Nemo


Levidromes - not just words!

We expanded our lists by adding the Hindi and Afrikaans languages. We came across some good wordlists of hindi and afrikaans words from https://github.com/Shreeshrii/hindi-hunspell/blob/master/Hindi/hi_IN.txt and libreoffice dictionaries. There are 2732 hindi and 438 afrikaans levidromes.

Well it looks like levidrome is hitting the news again. Not only did we publish an article to celebrate one year since the levidrome video was published, but so did Times Colonist, the Oakbay News and Victoria News. All these stories were published on October 9th, 2018, the "Birth Date" of levidrome.

In the Times Colonist article, Cindy E. Harnett recaps many of the hilites which occurred throughout the past year. She mentions that levidrome "appeared in newspapers in South Africa, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, India, Spain and Singapore".

In the Oakbay News and the Victoria News articles, Christine Van Reeuwyk writes a quote from Lucky (Levi's dad), stating "We have transcripts from radio shows discussing them in New Zealand, Australia, Germany. And we are seeing lists of Levidrome words in well over 20 languages including French, Italian, Russian, the languages of the Philippines.".

Quite the world trip, and quite the global presence. We are proud to be able to provide levidrome lists in many different languages!

Happy Birthday levidrome! We consider your birth date October 9th, 2017 when your YouTube video appeared on the internet. You are one year old today. You started out as a word in Levi's vocabulary. And today, one year later, you have made quite the impression.

Shortly after your birth, you started to become popular.

The Times Colonist picked up on your story and wrote and article about you. You made an appearance in the Urban Dictionary. William Shatner tweets to the Oxford Dictionary about you. You made an appearance in the Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary. Olympian Simon Whitfield tweets your name. People like your name so much, they register your name on the internet as domains. The Toronto Star publishes a story on you. Levidromelist.com is created because of you. Oxford Dictionary responded with a YouTube video of their own about you. You appear in an Oxford Dictionary blog. The Today website publishes a story about you. A song is written about you and published on YouTube.

CTV publishes a story about you. You make an appearance in the Wiktionary. You became a challenge project in various schools. You appear in an Oxford Dictionary blog for a second time. A number of beers are named after you. You get William Shatner's thumbs up tweet for the beer name. You inspired a new game, Cryptic Clue. Another website and hangman game is created because of you. You hit the Sunday edition of the NY Times. A randomly generated wordsearch puzzle is created because of you. You make an appearance in the NY Times a second time. You appear in the Urban Dictionary a second time. A wordcloud is inspired by you. An Operations: Levidrome on reddit's photoshopbattles was launched in honour of you. There are a lot of fun facts about you.

Like we said, you made quite the impression. You can find more details for these stories in our News section..

Happy Birthday levidrome ! ! !

The quest to get the word levidrome recognized by the dictionaries started almost one year ago. The YouTube video, "Levidrome - Let's get this word in the dictionary", was posted by LuckyBudd on October 9, 2017. As of today the video has been seen already over 40,000 times.

You may have seen the video, but have you ever read the words behind the video?

What is this sorcery you speak of? How do you "read" a video?

Well, a transcript of course.

Below we have put together a transcript from that video. Happy reading. Now before you comment, we know you can turn on Closed Captioning or CC on most youtube videos to read what is being said, and quite honestly that is how we created most of the transcript below. But CC is a best effort going against dictionaries, and guess what? Levidrome is not in any dictionary yet, so it couldn't resolve that word, among others. Anyways, here is the transcript:

Hi I'm Lucky (and I'm Levi) and we are doing a project.

We are trying to get a new word into the dictionary and we need your help. My son Levi has always been fascinated by language. Many a night when he was four I'd be woken up at four in the morning by...

Dad, I just thought of another great palindrome...Do you want to hear it...racecar...Isn't that great?

A palindrome is a word that is spelled the same forward as backwards so Levi was right.
R A C E C A R spelled backwards is racecar.

One day when he was five we pulled up to a stop sign. He looked at it and he said...

Mum, I see STOP spells POTS backwards... that's not a palindrome. What do you call a word like that in the English language where a word spells another word backwards?

Hmm... that's a good question buddy. Let's look that up when we get home.

When we got home we found that there was no word in the dictionary to describe a word that is spelled one way and spells another word backwards... like STOP and POTS...DOG and GOD...TIP and PIT. Sometimes people use the word "emordnilap" which is the word palindrome backwards, but this makes no sense at all and a bit of research told us that this isn't an official word either.

So we think that we should call these words levidromes after the five-year-old boy who came up with it.

When we contacted Webster's dictionary about it they said all we need to do is get this word to be popular. So all we need to do is keep on sharing this video as many times as possible and we can get this word named after Levi into the dictionary.

Levidrome

Levidromes are pretty cool. They are magical. We have compiled a list of fun facts about Levidromes:

1. Historical - Levidromes have been around ever since we had words. There just wasn't a word invented to describe this linguistic phenomenom of creating another valid word when spelling it backwards.
2. Multilingual - Levidromes exist in all languages. Levidrome Lists proves that. If you have an extensive list of words, then chances are you have levidromes.
3. Minority - Levidromes are rare. Only 0.32% of words (english) are levidromes.
4. Eponym - An Eponym is a word named after a person. Levidrome is named after its founder, Levi Budd.
5. Buds - By nature of their definition, levidromes always exist in pairs. If you have one levidromic partner, just spell the word backwards and you will find its buddy. Hmmm...Levi Budd. Levidrome for the word, budd for its "buddy", or pair....hmmm. There may be another word off to the dictionaries? Budd - one half of a levidrome pair. Also an eponym.
6. Scrabble - If you spell the word Levidrome in scrabble, it is a minimum of 15 points.
7. Longest English - The longest english levidrome pair has 8 letters (stressed - desserts, dioramas - samaroid, lattimer-remittal, nicolaus-sualocin, redrawer - rewarder).
8. Shortest - The shortest levidrome in english has 2 letters. There are 66 pairs of 2 lettered levidromes.
9. Longest Overall - The longest levidromic pair across all our different languages can be found in our Bulgarian list. It has an unprecidented 14 letters! I won't even pretend to know how to pronounce it (or even spell it), but it can be found here
10. Most Popular - Most english levidromes start with the letter "S".
11. Least Popular - There is only 1 english levidrome which starts with "Q", and that is in the english-insane list.
12. In the Alphabet - In the english-insane list there is a levidrome starting with every letter of the alphabet. In the regular english list, "Q" is missing.
13. Fate: - The 9 letters in the word "Levidrome" can re-arranged into a 7 letter levidrome pair (deliver - reviled), leaving the letters o and m, which is also a levidrome pair in the insane-english list (om - mo). So the message is "deliver om". My interpretation of this means "deliver levidrome to om", or deliver levidrome to the (o)Oxford and (m)Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Coincidence...I think not! Now we just need the reverse, that is, "om deliver" - meaning Oxford and Merriam-Webster will deliver by putting levidrome into their dictionaries.

We hope you learned something new about levidromes. If you can think of some other interesting facts, feel free to contact us and we will add them to our list.