Seven years already, and like the Energizer bunny, levidrome keeps on going.
It has been 7 years since the video was published to promote the levidrome cause.
We are still promoting the cause and this is the second article we have written in a month.
If one googles Levidrome, it is still making the news with the "Operation Levidrome" campaign against drugs in the UK.
Seven years and still going.
Levidrome, we've got this.
Just checked for recent levidrome activity and came across this video titled "What is Levidrome?"
Good to see people are still spreading the word.
Hats off to Minute Mysteries for their video.
Levidrome, we've got this.
Six years already, and levidrome is still going strong.
It has been 6 years since the video was published to promote the levidrome cause.
The cool part is Levi was 6 years old when he and his dad published the video. This year marks an important anniversary or birthday because the levidrome cause has been going on for more than half of his life.
We definitely recognize the word levidrome. To get the popular dictionaries to recognize and adopt the word as well apparently doesn't happen overnight.
We are still promoting the word and writing a couple of articles this year.
The noteworthy event in 2023 was international recognition and adoption with the "Operation Levidrome" campaign against drugs in the UK.
Six years and no signs of stopping.
Levidrome, we've got this.
Operation Levidrome has appeared twice already on Reddit's Photoshop Battles, in 2018 as well as in 2021.
These Operation Levidrome were contests or challenges in the photoshopbattle community where users created a photo using a pair of levidromes.
The submissions to these Operations were quite entertaining.
However, a new Operation Levidrome has appeared on the internet.
Staffordshire Police in the United Kingdom have also started an Operation Levidrome. This operation is not what you would traditionally expect.
The aim of Staffordshire's Operation Levidrome is to disrupt the production and supply of cannabis in their communities across the country.
Cannabis is also known a marijuana. On the streets, it also goes by a number of other names including Weed, Pot, Reefer, Grass, Dope, Ganja, Mary Jane, and Hash.
In case you haven't spotted it yet, the Operation Levidrome campaign is as simple as stop pots.
We would like to thank the Staffordshire Police not only in their efforts to put a stop to pot, but also for acknowledging the word Levidrome.
This acknowledgement not only is recognized in the Staffordshire Police community, but also by the community of Staffordshire as noted by Operation Levidrome being mentioned by various news agencies in the UK.
Way to go Staffordshire Police. Keeping levidrome alive. Also, don't do drugs.
Levidrome vs Semordnilap
Some people say a word already exists to fit the definition of a word with a new definition when the spelling is reversed.
And that word is Semordnilap.
I am not a linguist but rather a systems specialist, so I am a very logical type of person.
Let's look at this logically.
Semordnilap is the spelling of palindromes backwards. I would have to ask, why semordnilap? Why not emordnilap? After all, emordnilap is palindrome spelled backwards.
However, if it is emordnilap, then how do you handle one of the word families, palindromes plural? Would it be emordnilaps? But then that would be spalindrome in reverse, which makes no sense at all.
Ditto for the proposed semordnilap. What would be the plural for that? Semordnilaps? Again spalindromes backwards.
I think you get my meaning. The reversal of palindrome or palindromes is cute, but doesn't make sense to the rest of the word families.
And which one to choose? Semordnilip or Emordnilap?
There are entire word families which would need to be considered when a new word is introduced.
The word families for palindrome are:
In our previous article, we mentioned that semordnilap has been around since at least 1961. That is over 60 years. However, it has not sat well with linguists or the dictionaries. If it had, there would be more support for the word and it would already be accepted.
Palindrome is established. It is a well known word and a recognized dictionary definition.
Sure, if you reverse palindromes, you get semordnilap. If we reverse sentences, we get secnetnes. Again, pretty cool, so I would propose if we have a sentence spelled backwards, it should be Secnetnes? Of course not!
If we reverse Word, it becomes drow. Absolutely silly!
Every levidrome is a palindrome, but not every palindrome is a levidrome.
Since a levidrome is a special type of palindrome, it should have part of the word palindrome in it. A palindrome by defintion has the same spelling when reversed, so reversing the word itself provides no additional meaning.
The word should include either palin or drome.
Levi Budd suggested the word levidrome which had the drome part of palindrome.
He could have easily suggested Buddidrome. Other options would have included Palibudd.
Levidrome has a unique ring to it. A lot better than palindrome spelled backwards.
Let's make this happen people. Levidrome.
Even though we focus primarily on levidromes we introduced palindromes back in 2020. So every so often you will find articles about palindromes.
We stumbled upon a really neat twist on the palindrome in the form of a video.
John Bonney created a really interesting and unique palindrome song called Palendromium just over 10 years ago.
The song and lyrics were creatively composed to sound the same forwards and backwards.
Also, if you read the first letter of each line of the lyrics, it spells out the song's title, then again in reverse.
We have never come across something like this....really cool!
Here is the video.
Pretty amazing John. Well played.
Five years! Wow, time has flown by!
It has been 5 years since the video was published to promote the levidrome cause. Half a decade. This year marks a bit anniversary. If it was a wedding anniverary, then 5 years would be wood. Hence our wood gnawing friend wishing levidrome a half a decade of existence.
Levidrome became quite news worthy when first suggested 5 years ago. Over the years however, not too much has been appearing in the news anymore.
But that doesn't mean levidrome is disappearing. During the past year, we have been posting articles somewhat regularly. The levidrome game Cryptic Clue is still being played on Twitter. The Reddit community honored levidromes again with a second round of contests in their Photoshopbattles community. A youtube video was created showing the proper pronounciation of levidrome.
Levidromes, as well as palindromes, don't really appear too much in print or on the web because these words really don't make it to kitchen table conversations. Even though levidromic pairs occur much more frequent than expected, people are not going out of their way to say, "Oh, that was a levidrome". There was an article published on Times Colonist referencing this anomaly.
To get a word recognized by the popular dictionaries doesn't happen overnight. Five years, and levidromes are still going strong. They will be around at lot longer than you think.
Levidrome, we've got this.
Levidromes hit the main stage over four years ago. When it did, there was an article published by Alexander Atkins, called Levidrome: The Word That Launched a Thousand Erroneous Stories.
The jist of this article essentially said that there was already a word to describe what levidrome is wanting to define, and that word is semordnilap.
Semordnilap is palindromes spelled backwards.
Semordnilap made its first appearance in 1961 when it appeared as an annotation in the book Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature, by C.C Bombaugh.
This word was also pointed out in the video which Lucky / Levi produced to promote their levidromic cause.
As pointed out in the video and in other articles, semordnilap has not been accepted by the vast majority of linquists or the population at large.
Levidrome. Semordnilap. But are there other words as alternates?
Google is your friend.
If you check the internet for semordnilap, you should come across a few articles.
In a Today I Found Out article which was written in 2015, it mentions a number of potential words which could have the same definition as levidrome.
These are:
From the The Island English Tutor article, anadromes, heteropalindromes and palingrams were mentioned. The author, AJ Mittendorf, admits making up the word palingrams. The article, which appears under the site's word play section had no date but appears to have been published late 2014 or early 2015.
I was quite impressed with this article because it actually had a list of 189 levidromes. Hmmm, an odd number, how is that possible since levidromes are always in pairs?
Some of these suggested words listed above could possibly be in the running for a word with a different definition when the spelling is reversed.
However, if one looks more closely at these suggestions, some of them already exist in the dictionary but the definition doesn't quite fit for a levidrome.
Other words are a play on the word palindrome. Indeed, a levidrome is a palindrome but a special type of palindrome because of its unique definition. Many of these plays on the word palindrome (including semordnilap) were not accepted and do not appear in the dictionaries. Levidrome too is composed of the word palindrome because of the nature of the word, ie. spelled backwards.
Of the words you have seen today, which is your favorite? We may be a little biased, but we like levidrome.
Intriguing title. Call Me Levidrome. For some reason when I hear that I think of the song "Call Me Mayby".
The word levidrome has been around now for over four years.
As such, a fan of this word could make a username called "levidrome" for their account somewhere.
This is definitely not far fetched. There is a twitter account called levidrome. There is a hashtag called #levidrome. There is levidrome@gmail.com on Google. When people play games, some people may use the word levidrome as their gaming ID. Watch Slither.io and see.
The levidrome.com domain is still owned by someone. The same with levidrome.ca and levidromes.com. Levidromelist.com too (by me of course). But the others, someone is still keeping up the domain name and paying to keep the domain registered and active. Imagine that. People are paying to keep the word levidrome alive.
That is just the username.
Dollars to donuts, I bet some people may be using levidrome as a password too. Why not? It is not a dictionary word, yet. It is unique enough. Nine letters. So for now, quite a secure password (just change it up a bit with special characters, etc).
Let's face it, people love the word "Levidrome".
And what's not to love? It is a cool word, and if you have been following the levidrome quest, it is a worthy word for this unique type of palindrome.
Call me Levidrome. Call me Maybe. Maybe Levidrome? This is crazy.
If not anything, I hope we left a song going in your head.
Go Levidrome!
We have been following levidrome since the idea first came out a number of years ago. We want to find new news, posts, articles, videos or anything new about levidromes and update our "Levidrome Central".
To source out new information, Google is your friend. We do custom searches through Google and various other search engines, limiting our searches to anything new which was posted, say in the last 30 days. We came across another YouTube video.
The YouTube channel Learning Family hilights various words and phrases and shows the proper pronounciation of those words. And look what was posted on March 11, 2022. Levidrome!
It is nice to see that this site first of all recognizes the word levidrome, but also went through the effort of making a pronounciation video for it.
Way to go Learning Family! We too recognize your page!
Today is February 22, 2022. If we have a date format of mm/dd/yyyy, a common and popular date format you would find mostly in Europe, today would be written as 22/02/2022
This will be the last levidromic or palindromic date of this century.
Happy Levidrome Day! Oh, and also, Happy Palindrome Day!
First post of the year.
2022!
Wow, writing it down make it sound so ... futuristic.
The journey continues for another year.
To start the year we will recap the quest. Levi and his father are trying to get the word levidrome recognized by the official dictionaries.
There is not a dictionary recognized word fitting the definition of "a word with a different meaning when the spelling is reversed". Levidrome is on their watch list.
Semordnilap is not recognized.
Semordnilap is a palindrome for palindromes.
So an important part of a levidrome is also a palindrome.
Palindromes became part of our website back in 2020. Why not? It is part of the story of a levidrome. We haven't really paid too much tribute to the palindrome on our levidrome focussed website, but maybe we should.
Palindromes have been around since the eary 1600s, invented by poet and playwright Ben Jonson (no, not the Canadian sprinter, that was Ben Johnson). It is comprised of greek words "palin" meaning "again" and "dromos" meaning "direction".
So Palindrome means "again direction" (sounds like a music group).
Pretty cool.
Palindromes have been recognized for over 400 years.
Since palindromes means "again direction", then Levidrome could mean "Levi direction".
Another sign for the dictionaries to follow. To the direction of Levidrome for this unique word.
2022! Futuristic! Welcome to the future. Welcome to Levidromelist.com!
Let's make this happen.
There is a hashtag for this...#levidrome
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 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
Second Place - Switchup (Paws==Swap)
Third Place - Cod==Doc
Levidromes - not just words!
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!
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.
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.
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...
And when rotated 180 degrees, it's levidromic pair - flow...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
Regal lager
and DNA
pool loop.
Devil lived
on no
Sleep. Peels
stink. Knits
net. Ten
edit tide.
God dog
won now.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Back in 2018, we wrote an article called More Levidromes words. Our new article could almost be an addendum to that article.
Over the years, we have put together some pretty good lists of levidromes - in many different languages. We started with English, then branched off to any language where we were able to get a decent list of words.
But that is the blessing, as well as a curse. Finding lists was initially easy. The system which runs this website has an Ubuntu Linux operating system. As part of Ubuntu, it maintains a list of words in multiple languages if one chooses to install them. These lists are used for, among other things, to determine if users' passwords are strong enough for certain applications (after all, no one should be using a password which is in a dictionary file, should they?).
So levidrome lists were built from predefined dictionary word lists.
But not all words are in these word lists or dictionaries. Sound familiar?
Case in point. Adanac. This is a levidrome for Canada. Canada appears in our english word lists, but Adanac doesn't. As such, it isn't in our levidrome lists.
However, try googling adanac. You will find many references.
To start...
It is the name of an Antique shop in Winnipeg, MB
It is the name of a military cemetery in France.These are just a few of the references to adanac.
But with all these references, it is still not in a dictionary word list, so not in our official lists.
As stated in the previous article, William Shatner found the word Serutan...which is Natures in reverse. Also a levidrome pair excluded from our levidrome lists.
There must be hundreds if not thousands of other made up words which have levidromic pairs.
We too have made up a levidromic word - Emag - which is game in reverse. It is the latest levidrome game added to our collection. In fact, if you google Emag, there is a website for machine tools at https://www.emag.com as well.
Ironic. Made up words all over the internet. Some which are actual brick and mortar locations. Established. Sounds like a goal. Sounds like something we should be doing.
Well, that is our goal too. We are trying. As always, #levidrome
Three years ago today, Oxford Dictionaries responded to a tweet from William Shatner about the word Levidrome in a YouTube video labelled Oxford Dictionaries: Levidrome. You may have seen the video, but some people enjoy reading instead. As of writing of this article the video has been viewed almost 10,000 times.
Below we have put together a transcript from that video. Happy reading.
Ironically, if you throw the transcript into our levidrome finder, there were 44 levidromes in their verbiage (using the non-insane english list), include 4 levidromic pairs (which were cited in their examples).
Levidromes should be in the news again today? Today marks the 3rd birthday for the initial Levidrome video posted by Levi and his father.
We are also attempting to assist with getting the word recognized by periodically checking the internet for new activities then posting those activities within our news section.
Although the video was posted on October 9, 2017 it didn't start getting traction until November of 2017. That was when News outlets began picking up the story. Not bad. From video to News is less than one month.
When it hit the News, that was when we heard about it, and shortly afterwards, levidromelist.com came into being.
We were intrigued with the story and very curious of the outcome. We started to help spread the word by creating our various lists. The goal was to assist with global recognition by showing the world that levidromes existed not only in English but all languages.
Our goal was achieved. Lists in different languages.
But we didn't stop there. Games. News. Tools. Recognition.
Recognition? There are many hits of levidrome on the internet. If one searches for levidrome in your favorite search engine, you will surely find us. But will it be enough? We need the recognition of the dictionaries. The true end-goal for levidrome. Three years seems like a long time. In some respects, it is. But in the overall scheme of things, it can be looked upon as foundation building. Establishing a foundation which will stand for all time does take time. 3 years, and now counting. A foundation of usage.
Levi and his father ran the first mile with their video. The torch is now passed on to all of us to continue this race to recognition. Hang in there levidrome. We will cross that finish line. We got this.
Happy 3rd Birthday Levidrome.
As a computer geek, I dabble a bit in different programming languages and development kits. I started to play with Unity to see how hard it would be to develop an online 3D game.
We have previously developed a word match game (easy and hard), and figured we could spice it up a bit.
So here is a sneak peek at Emag, which is a levidrome for the word Game (clever, huh?). You walk around the arena using the classic W, A, S, D keys, jumping with the spacebar, and shooting with the mouse. The goal is to match the levidromes. Once matched, they collide into each other and disappear. You continue until there are no more tiles in the arena.
It is still in Beta, so there may be glitches...and it is definitely unfinished. It does not play very well on mobile devices so for now it is recommended you play the game on a PC. Depending on interest, we will develop it further, so for now, have fun.
If you have any suggestions or comments, please contact us.
So, without further ado, here is Emag. Enjoy.
Another levidrome video hits YouTube.
Hats off to youtuber Pinay sa Canada for creating her "Palindromes and Emordnilps (Anadromes and Levidromes)" video. In her video, she provides examples of palindromic sentences as well as levidromic partners.
Way to go Pinay! Thanks for spreading the word. Great Video!
Note: We found out about the video on May 5th, but posted it with April 28th in our News section to keep in line with the chronology of levidromes.
The physical levidrome. What does that even mean?
Well, a lot of what you see on our website is virtual. The articles. The images. Our levidrome memory game. All these things exist in cyber-space. On the "intertubes".
It is when something moves from a virtual presence to a physical space, that is when people need to start paying more attention.
Some words will never cross the border into the physical realm.
But that is hard for a word like levidrome. It is a word. An idea.
Or is it hard?
This transformation has already happened into the physical world.
It happened years ago when children came up with levidromes in classrooms and wrote them on pieces of paper and taped them to boards. The word levidrome became physical.
It happened years ago as well when a brewing company printed their first label and placed it on their newly brewed beer. The label is physical. The beer is also physical (thank goodness). You can actually taste a levidrome (legal age of drinking disclaimer needs to be inserted here).
It happened when the NY Times published an article about levidromes. On physical news print.
As you can see in the image here, the cup is physical. The shirt is physical (although technically, to me, they both are still virtual because it is a digital photograph) but you get my point. They are physical to someone, possibly even swag belonging to William Shatner.
The final step for this transcension from virtual to physical involves the dictionary publishers. Once they publish their new dictionaries with the word levidrome between their covers, the journey is complete. It is the ultimate goal for any new proposed word - to appear physically on the pages of a dictionary.
I am looking forward to publishing the article, "The Journey is Complete".
But alas, the journey continues.
Hang in there levidrome. As always, #levidrome.
February 2, 2020 can be written as 02/02/2020, or 2020/02/02, 02-02-2020 or 2020-02-02.
Now remove some dashes or slashes and place a space, we end up with
2020 0202
or
0202 2020
Notice something. They are levidromes!
But wait . . . Can numbers be levidromes? Sure, why not!
By definition, a Levidrome is "word with a different definition when the spelling is reversed". If one looks at 2020, it is definitely a different number than 0202. It follows the definition perfectly.
By the way, the next levidromic date will be at the end of next year, on December 2, 2021, with 12/02/2021. Hopefully we will not have to wait that long for the dictionaries to recognize levidrome as an official word. Otherwise, we may need to wait for the next levidromic date. Anyone know when that will be?.
On a side note, I suppose I could have written the date as 02022020 or 20200202 without the space in the middle. But then I would have created a couple of numeric palindromes, and this website is all about levidromes. The difference between creating a palindrome or a levidrome in this particular case is a conveniently placed "space". And that's how it is done. So February 2, 2020 is a levidromic date. ;)
As always, spread the word, and the word is levidrome!
This website was started after we were inspired by the video about levidromes posted by Levi Budd and his father. There have been other videos about levidromes as well, from songs to creative projects. However, those videos are specifically about levidromes. This post is going to talk about something a bit different.
The definition of a levidrome is A word with a new definition when the spelling is reversed. So levidromes are words. If we have a video and play it, it also provides a story or a specific meaning. However, if the video is reversed and the meaning of the video is completely different than the original "forward" version, well that makes that video a levidromic video.
A levidromic video is a video with a different meaning when played in reverse.
Here are a couple of examples of levidromic videos.
Fire
Boat
There is a large collection of similar levidromic videos on Reddit in their reversegif section.
Enjoy!
We crunched the data - the Complete Works of William Shakespeare - and came up with a startling conclusion - William Shakespeare was a levidromist!
Everyone has heard of William Shakespeare. A poet, playwright and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. He is also regarded as the world's greatest dramatist.
And now for us to introduce some drama. He was also a levidromist.
Back in late 2018, we introduced a tool to our website called "levidrome finder". This tool allows the reader to enter in some text (up to 100000 characters at a time) and it will find all the levidromes and any matching levidromic pairs. Using the tool at the backend (with no restrictions imposed), we ran it against the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's works consists of 39 plays, 154 sonnets and 2 narrative poems. They can be viewed at http://shakespeare.mit.edu/. We captured all this "data" and ran our tool against it.
Here is the summary of the results:
From the english-insane list results, there are 265208 levidromes. Doing the math, 265208 / 931523 = 28.5 %. From the english list results...that is 110180 / 931523 = 11.8 %
Now depending on which results your prefer, Shakespeare's works are made up of either 11.8% or 28.5% levidromes. Either way, that is a lot of levidromes.
And naturally his works also produced levidromic pairs. We have included links to the results:
Based on those figures, we can clearly say Shakespeare was a levidromist since better than 1 out of every 4 words is a levidrome. Way to go Shakespeare! Or should I call you William. Heck, we are friends now....Bill.
This is no surprise to us (I know, I used the word "startling" before but that was to add to the drama). After all, we are all levidromists. We wrote an article and did a snapshot from the New York Times on the day the article was written. And sure enough, 20% of that snapshot was made up of levidromes. They are everywhere.
If Shakespeare was a levidromist, then surely the dictionaries should get on board as well.
Spread the word. Even share the article. As always, #Levidrome
Happy 2nd Birthday levidrome!
The quest officially began 2 years ago. We at levidromelist.com think of October 9, 2017 as your birthday because that was when your video was published. Wow, time flies.
You just have to go through our News section to see some of the recent developments with the word levidrome. Our site is not the master authority however (although we would like to think so), as there are other websites publishing articles about levidromes.
So for a status update, the levidrome community and supporters are still in a holding pattern waiting for the dictionaries to recognized you. In our eyes, you are already recognized.
Happy 2nd Birthday levidrome ! ! !
William Shatner, a celebrity advocate for levidromes, tweeted to OxfordWords on October 5, 2019
Hey @OxfordWords Check out the video. It also suggests #Levidrome should be added the the dictionary.
The video Shatner is referring to is the video published by Dominic Fayard on YouTube.
People use levidromes words constantly. They are in all works of publishing (web, books, etc). If you read the article Levidrome Finder, you can see they could make up about 20% of the content of what is published.
Thanks all for the recent spreading of the word. #Levidrome
Another levidrome video hits YouTube.
Hats off to Dominic Fayard for creating his "Naming Twins" video. In his video, he states, "The goal was simple. To create a video unlike any other." In his video, Fayard compares the 2 proposed words currently being suggested for defining "A word that spells another valid word when read backwards". Those words being semordnilap and levidrome. He endorses levidrome. In the video, he hilites Aidan and Nadia, twins in the video made in a "lego movie" style.
Way to go Dominic! Thanks for spreading the word. Great Video!
Note: We found out about the video on October 10, but posted it with Sep 23rd in our News section to keep in line with the chronology of levidromes.
We are slowly approaching the 2 year point from when the Levidrome video hit YouTube. We aren't the only ones who noticed.
William Shatner, an celebrity advocate for levidromes, tweeted to OxfordWords on August 28, 2019.
Hey @OxfordWords any updates on #Levidrome being added? It's been in popular use for nearly 2 years now.
And Oxford responded on August 30, 2019
Hello @WilliamShatner. Thank you for getting in touch. Levidrome doesn't yet meet the criteria to be added to the dictionary, but it is on our tracking list for potential inclusion in the future.
In our eyes that is a positive response. The fact that it is still on a tracking list means that it is still on Oxford's radar.
As usual, keep on spreading the word. #Levidrome
The Australian National Dictionary Centre had a Ozwords competition on Twitter on May 9, 2019.
Here is an excerpt from their tweet:
Ozwords Competition No. 52
In 2017, a young Canadian boy, Levi Budd, invented a new term to describe a word that spells another valid word backwards. For example, stop / pot, deliver / reviled, loop / pool. Levi's term is levidrome, based on his own name and palindrome (a word or phrase that reads the same backwards as forwards). Thanks to a video posted on social media by Levi's father, the word levidrome has gained a lot of publicity. Oxford Dictionaries commented that levidrome is on their watch list of words, and if it becomes used widely, in a year or so it may be added to their dictionaries. Not a bad effort for a six-year-old. Our challenge to you in this competition is to come up with an interesting levidrome. The best, most entertaining, or perhaps the longest one wins. Extra points for levidromes if you convince us the pair of words relate in some way, such as stressed / desserts -- a great levidrome for those on a no-sugar diet.
Reply to @ozworders and @OxfordAustralia to enter. What a great way to spread the word.
Back in November of 2018 we created a couple of games. Well in actuality, it is the same game but an easy version and a hard version. In either version, the gameplay is the same. You match the levidromic pairs in the shortest amount of guesses and time. At the end of the game, well that's where the hidden fun lies.
Would you believe there are over 3400 unique combinations of comments at the end of the game? In addition to your score, a random compliment is provided as well as a random fact, joke, or phrase / compliment. And naturally, all the comments revolve around levidromes. See how many you can find? See how many you will recognize.
There is also the challenge factor to the games. To see if you can beat the best score of the day, or of all time. The best score of the day resets daily at midnight. So if you are the first one to play that day, you are guaranteed to have the best daily score (for a while anyways until someone else gets a better score). Both the easy and hard version of the game have their own unique daily and all-time scores.
If you would like to add another comment to the game, let us know in our contact page, and as long as it is clean and fun (and of course, levidromic), you may see it popping up at the end of the game as well. Plus you would also have bragging rights saying you helped with the development of an internet game.
Have fun playing! Also have fun reading all the comments.
Hmmm...another levidrome challenge...who will be the first one to see or document all the comments? (present company excluded, of course) :)
Is Levidrome a Game to You? Loaded question. The answer is no... and yes. Let's take a look.
No. Levidrome is not a game. It is definitely serious. To propose a new word and then rallying support from the public to start using the word is not a game. To prove to the dictionaries that levidrome should be included is a task indeed. To have articles written and stories broadcast on the news and on the internet is not child's play. To receive support from prominent personalities does not sound like a game to me. To have a website built dedicated to levidromes...hmmmm....now we are getting into a grey area.
Levidrome List started as another way of acknowledging the word levidrome. It was also a way of creating a consolildated site for all things levidromic, from multilingual lists to a chronology of the journey, to unique adaptations of games that incorporate levidromes.
Did I just say games? Is Levidrome a Game to You? Yes. And not just to us. Levidrome words have appeared on game shows (Jeopardy). Games have been build specifically with a levidromic theme. Levidrome Match Games (Easy and Hard). Levidrome Challenges. Levidrome Crosswords. Levidrome Hangman. Levidrome Cryptic Clues.
Word games are educational and they are fun. Games are a good medium for spreading the word. Sometimes, finding levidromes in the wild isn't easy, but when they are at the centre of attention like they are in levidromic games, then it is all about the levidromes. And what better way to not only spread the word but also to have fun doing it than by playing games based on our favorite word, Levidromes.
When the Oxford and Webster dictionaries decide to accept the word levidrome into their dictionaries, we are curious which definition they will use. The idea behind the word levidrome is simple but the wording has to be just right. The definition may reflect the internationality of the word because levidromes exist in all languages. The wording may be able to stand on it's own without making a reference to a palindrome. They will probably include some examples, or a sample sentence with the word levidrome in the sentence. What examples will they use? Are they going to look at current definitions already published in places like the Urban Dictionary x 2, or the Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary? Will one dictionary publish their definition before the other? Will both popular dictionares have a hundle to determine the best definition? How will levidrome translate into other languages? Levidromo? Levidromen?
We have asked a lot of questions. But these were all rhetorical questions because that's what we do when we post articles on the internet. Stir up some debate and possibly some discussions. Make the readers think. One thing is certain though. All questions will be answered given time.
Actually, after writing this article we understand the complexity of adding a new word to the dictionaries. Not only will the dictionaries have to be updated but so will online tools such as Google Translate, independent translators, dictionaries in other languages, printed dictionaries (do they still exist?), and other miscellaneous databases, etc.
Also, ironically even though the title of this article is "Levidrome Definition", we haven't published our definition of levidrome. Or have we? If you think of it, levidromist sounds a lot like Levidromelist (hint, look at the Urban Dictionary link). I guess we shouldn't have to wrap everything up in a nice bow for Oxford and Merriam-Webster. We should leave a little work for them to do. As always, #levidrome.
For our first article in 2019 we figure we put together a writeup to acknowledge a parodic reference to a levidrome. As you are aware, a levidrome is a word which creates another word when spelled backwards, such as "rail" and "liar", or "tops" and "spot". William Shatner, a celebrity who is a prominent advocate of the word levidrome came up with an idea for another unique type of word. The concept of his idea is taking a word and flipping it upside down, like the image of the word "swims" you see here. Now, depending on the font, you may actually get a word to appear. And since William (or Bill) came up with the idea, this type of word should be called a "Billidrome" which is a play on the words "levidrome" and "palindrome".
A number of letters stay the same when inverted, such as capital "H", "O", "S" or "Z" but others become different letters, such as lowercase "q" becoming "b", or "p" becoming "d". "N" is unique because capital "N" is still "N", but lowercase "n" becomes "u" when inverted. And if you really push the envelope, a "7" can become an "L", a "3" can become an "E", and a "^" can become a "v"...such as in the words "Love" and "3^o7". There are other letters, numbers and characters which create another letter, number or character when flipped.
Billidrome
Here is a list we have compiled of some Billidromes, using only letters:
(you may notice some of these words are not only billidromes, but also palindromes. There is even one levidrome in the mix, see if you can spot it.)
On a final note thank you William Shatner for having the foresight to not call this new type of word a Willidrome.
If you have any other Billidromes you would like to see on this page, leave us a comment, and we will add it.
As per usual, spread the word with #LEVIDROME, or maybe even, #BILLIDROME?
With the introduction of our latest tool to find levidromes, we decided to write a followup article about levidromes in the wild.
Levidromes are pretty cool. However, standing by themselves without their levidromic partner present, they are just ordinary words. For the most part, you wouldn't even give them a second glance when using them in normal writing or publishing. There are levidromes in most written publications, from the King James Bible, to the works of Shakespeare to the front page of the New York Times.
However, the true magic of a levidrome occurs when the matching pair of a levidrome sneaks onto the page. The closer to the matching pair, the more "magical".
Dennis sinned. Now that is a purist form of a levidrome pair. It is a complete sentence, composed only of levidromes. Not bad.
Not bad? Wait, if you didn't quite catch it, the words "Not Bad" are also both levidromes...not (ton) and bad (dab). Also a "purist" sentence, because both words are levidromes. However, the spark of the magic is somewhat diminished because their pairs were nowhere to be seen.
If a sentence has both pairs of the levidrome, it is truly a magical sentence. The "Whoa" factor.
If not in a sentence, then perhaps in a paragraph? If a paragraph has both pairs of a levidrome making their appearances, the magic is still there.
However, if the levidromic pairs appear way across a document from one another, it just becomes a "cool" moment, assuming that you found them. I suppose that is why the phenomenom of levidromes in the wild are difficult to spot. They are everywhere, but you need to be looking for them in order to make the connections.
Accidental placements of levidrome pairs are extraordinarily phenomenal, because that is when the magic really happens. The author unintentially uses both pairs of a levidrome close enough to each other that a wary reader will recognize them. Those are wild levidromes. No planning. No preparation. Just luck of the draw.
The levidrome finder tool we developed will help find those levidromes in the wild, and if their levidromic pair is in your text selection, then it will help you find those magical instances.
Phew, this article made me a bit stressed, I think I will flow down to the kitchen and wolf down some leftover desserts. Accidental levidromes? Ah ha, you caught me. But a double whammy levidromic pair in a single sentence? Too tempting to resist, and besides, what a great way to end this article on a doubly magical note. ;)
We have introduced a new tool to help people find levidromes in various documents.
The tool is called Levidrome Finder. To used the tool you copy your text then paste it into the text box of the tool then click on "Find those Levidromes". The process will then seek out the language you have selected and find any matching levidromes. It will hilite the levidromes and mark them as bold if both pairs are in the same document. There is also a summary at the bottom of the results page with counts of all levidromes found.
The image we have in this article shows a snippet from the NYTimes text after we did a copy and paste of their website. From the December 16, 2018 web edition of the NY Times, our Levidrome finder found 185 levidromes from 1856 words from their website. Not bad. Ten percent of the front page on that day were levidromes! If we change the language selection to English-Insane, it is closer to 20 percent. And, there were also 4 levidrome pairs found as well (both partners of the levidrome pair). We think that is pretty exciting.
Try out our tool on other pages or on other documents. You will soon discover that we are all levidromists without even really trying.
Have fun, and #LEVIDROME
Let's make this happen!
Aside: This "Levidrome Finder" article had 26 levidromes. See if you can find them. Hint. Use the tool.
On November 20, 2018 the gameshow Jeopardy! had a category called "Forwards & Backwards" (which can be seen here) which depicted similar answers you would find in the Levidrome game, Cryptic Clues. And guess what, the questions were levidromes.
This category did not go unnoticed by levidromists.
William Shatner noticed and posted a Tweet to Jeopardy! stating "Hey @Jeopardy you should change your category to #Levidrome It's a real word and less letters"
After not receiving a response, Shatner tweeted another Tweet to Jeopardy! stating "I believe today is the anniversary of suggesting that #Levidrome be put into the dictionary! Have we heard from @Jeopardy about this? Where's Trebek?" Jeopardy! responded with "Where's Trebek? He's trying to figure out how a 6-year-old might get a word in the dictionary before him!".
This story was picked up by some news outlets, particularly CTV News on November 29, 2018.
This is the sort of attention we need to see. Let's make this happen.
...the category wasn't levidromes. Jeopardy! had their Teen Tournament games between November 7 and November 20, 2018. In their 10th game of the competition, Jeopardy! had a category called "Forwards and Backwards" in their double jeopardy round. In this category, they would show the answer and then ask for a pair of words for the question.
Alex Trebek, the host for Jeopardy! described the "Forwards & Backwards" category as "We'll need 2 words for each response, and each one will be the reverse of the other".
Since there isn't a formal definition for "Forwards & Backwards" words, Jeopardy! opted with just calling the category "Forwards & Backwards".
This was a classic levidrome category.
In case you missed it, here is an excerpt from the "Forwards & Backwards" round:
We think it is time for Jeopardy! to start using the word levidromes. After all, there is a word for these backwards type of words.
We did a bit of digging. Jeopardy! is in its 35th season. Congratulations Jeopardy! Jeopardy! had made use of the levidromic categories in the past including a few variations. You can view these results in the links below:
I suppose we can let it slip for the older shows because levidrome wasn't even a word yet. (Heck, Levi was not even born yet for most of the episodes). But anything going forward, it should be levidromes.
I think this is the quickest sequel in the history of games. We modified the original game we published at the beginning of the month. We call it the hard version, or "Levidrome Memory Match Game II, the Sequel". It is the exact game as the easy version as far as game play, levidrome pairs and endgame comments but with only one exception - the "colors" (or as we Canadians like to say, the "colours"). It is amazing the difference colors make in a game - it makes it that much more difficult when you only have words to match, like STOP, SPOT, TOPS, POTS. Anyways, check it out at either the easy version or hard version.
We have adding another game to our site. Enjoy our adaption of the standard memory game, or match game. Instead of matching images, you match levidromic pairs. Have fun playing the memory game. Beat your time. Try solving the game in the fewest guesses. Challenge your friends. Each game will be a bit different, so play often. Have fun.
What better way to share levidromes than by playing levidrome games. So we updated our website with the new games section as well and linked all known levidrome games.
Special thanks to Marina Ferreira for her tutorial, https://medium.freecodecamp.org/vanilla-javascript-tutorial-build-a-memory-game-in-30-minutes-e542c4447eae for the basics of setting up the game.
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!
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:
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.
Levidrome has hit Reddit in a big way. Reddit is a discussion group with images and topics which are voted up or down by other members. Reddit has a number of subreddits of various specific topics. One of the more popular subreddits is photoshopbattles with over 13.7 million subscribers.
At Photoshopbattles, people submit photos and other members manipulated the photos in unique ways in forms of comments with an image attached. Then the user community votes for the best comment. Photoshopbattles also have weekly Contests and Operations. The next contest entry is decided by the winner of the current contest. Operations, however are decided by the moderators of photoshopbattles. Photoshopbattles delivers a weekly "Operations" contest with a specific theme. Their current Operation is called Levidrome.
It will be really fun to see the entries. Levidromes in pictures, and knowing the photoshopbattle community, there will be some pretty creative pictures. The Operation image displayed here is of the levidrome (Dog, God). Part of the fun will also be to vote for the best image.
We are proud to have an extensive list of levidromes. We are proud to be able to provide lists in multiple languages. However, we are humble to say we have all known levidromes.
Case in point.
Just look at the Tweet William Shatner posted on September 24th, 2018. Serutan, a levidrome with the word "natures". It was a laxative used between 1930 to 1960. We are assuming since it was an older product it never ended up in our word lists. Who knows how many more levidromes are out there.
Way to go William Shatner!
We have found another creative use for a list of words and in our particular case a list of English levidromes. We have created a word cloud (also known as a "tag cloud") of levidromes pairs! This was accomplished with help from the website https://www.wordclouds.com. It was really easy to put together. Click on the image on the left or here to see the final word cloud image of levidromes.
We love levidromes!
The word levidrome makes its second appearance in the Urban Dictionary. The entry was submitted on September 4, 2018 by userid levidromist with the following definition:
levidrome
A word with a new definition when the spelling is reversed
The levidrome for "stop" is "pots"
This is the same definition which appears in the Wiktionary submission.
The word levidrome appeared in the New York Times two consecutive months in a row.
William Shatner, an advocate for getting the word levidrome recognized by the Oxford Dictionary, recently posted this tweet on his Twitter page. Essentially, the New York Times printed an article about the word levidrome in their Sunday printed edition on July 29, 2018 (you can see the article here). There was an error in the article about Levi's hometown.
So on August 25, 2018 the NY Times published a correction. The correction which was in the Kids section of the Sunday NY Times stated:
KIDS
An article in the July 29 kids section about how words get into the dictionary gave the incorrect hometown for Levi Budd, who coined the word "levidrome." He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, not Vancouver.
As William Shatner pointed out in his tweet:
Hello @OxfordWords! I wanted to point out the word #levidrome was used in the @nytimes today. That's a pretty amazing journey from not being a word a year ago. (thumbs up)
The goal of this website is to acknowledge the word levidrome. Once it becomes recognized, not only will levidrome become a word but also its word family?
What is a word family?
It is a "a group of related words that are formed from the same word"
Using palindrome as a basis, here is a complete list of words which will be created once the popular dictionaries accepts and acknowledges the word levidrome. Please contact us if you believe we missed something.
What can you do if you have a list of words, especially cool levidromes? Words and word search puzzles go hand in hand. Check out our recent addition to our website, the Levidrome Word Search Puzzle.
It changes every time you refresh the page, so come back often if you enjoy word searches!
In the Sunday's New York Times (July 29, 2018, printed edition), an article was published by Nathan Mattise titled "How New Words Get Into the Dictionary". Mattise corresponded with Jane Solomon, a lexicographer at Dictionary.com. Mattise focussed on three words in his article - dabbing, grown and levidrome. Here is the write-up on levidrome.
levidrome (noun) - A word that, when spelled backward, forms another word. This word was coined last year by Levi Budd, a 6-year-old who lives in Vancouver, Canada. It applies to words like "pots" ("stop" in reverse) and rats ("star"). (You may have heard of a palindrome, a word that reads the same both ways, like "racecar.") "Levidrome" isn't in the dictionary yet - it's only under consideration - but Solomon thinks there will be enough support to add it. "A word when backwards that spells another word feels kind of magical" she says. "I can see it taking off."
Hats off to Rob Wise, Eugene Arkhipov and Renan Aguiar for adapting the popular Hangman game to find two words instead of one. And what are these words you may asked. Well, Levidromes of course. The game will provide 2 answers, with definitions of each of the levidrome pairs. Click on the image or visit Levidrome Game to give it a try. Have fun!
Try not to cheat, but if you need hints (wink, wink), and you happen to stumble across this list of possible answers...(wink, wink)...I'll say no more. ;)
A podcast appeared on Victoria This Week, featuring stories about life in Victoria, BC. Three topics were discussed, one of which was about the Levidrome beer manufactured by Phillips Brewing. At the end of the levidrome segment, James Ball and Ryan Price played a game which they called Cryptic Clues. They had 5 cryptic clues:
Cryptic Clue: A bakery ignores you.
Answer: SNUB - BUNS
Cryptic Clue: I need some cash to change the baby.
Answer: DIAPER - REPAID
Cryptic Clue: Seinfield's neighbor has comment for you.
Answer: KRAMER - REMARK
Cryptic Clue: The greek god of thunder likes canals.
Answer: ZEUS - SUEZ
Cryptic Clue: Ben Afflick's BFF walks the earth.
Answer: DAMON - NOMAD
Shortly after this segment aired, Cryptic clues started to be seen on the Lucky Budd Twitter Account. or the Daily Levidrome Twitter Account. Every week, there would be a clue to a levidrome pair. You would try to guess what the levidrome pair is based on the clue. It was one of the first levidrome games to come out.
William Shatner noticed the Phillips Brewing Co Levidrome Lager, and he tweets his approval with a thumbs up.
William Shatner has been very influential with getting the levidrome word recognized. Not only does he recognize a good word, but he also recognizes a good lager. Regal Lager.
Phillips Brewing & Malting Co. located in Victoria, BC has produced a beer in recognition of the word Levidrome. Their Imperial Regal Lager is a seasonal beer with the levidromes "Regal" and "Lager".
The description Phillips beer has for the Levidrome Beer is:
Levidrome
Imperial Lager
Pours a pale straw colour with light white foam. Herbal and grassy notes mingle with the noble hop and sweet malt character. Its light and balanced mouthfeel finishes with a subtle sweetness.
Malt: Medium
Colour: Light
Hops: Less
Here is a close-up of the label for the beer. On the label it states:
"Regal" is a levidrome spelling "Lager" backwards. Invented by 6 year old Levi Budd who discovered there was no official term to describe this fun linguistic twist. Levidrome Imperial Regal Lager is a bold but balanced strong pilsner brewed to celebrate curiosity and wonder. Help "Levidrome" get added to the dictionary and toast Levi with a big beer for big ideas.
As a side note, there have been at least 2 other breweries who brewed their levidrome-themed beers in the US and Sweden.
Mr. Richey from Rogers and Strawberry Vale School had created The Levidrome Challenge earlier in the year. He had previously posted a tweet of his challenge. He later reposted it but this time bringing @Oxfordwords into loop.
An article appears on the "Your School Library" website as well. You can view the full article here. We also have a copy of his bulletin board which can be viewed here.
The Oxford Dictionary posts an article on their blog titled "You say 'Super Bowl', I Say 'Superb Owl': what is the name for this wordplay?"
In the article Lauren Holden from Yorkshire, England, mentioned "In fact, Oxford Dictionaries' lexicographers are currently tracking use of 'levidrome', a word that was coined by a young Canadian boy last year after realizing there is no name for words that form differently when read forwards and backwards (unlike a palindrome)."
The Victoria News Website published an excellent summary of Levi's journey titled "Levidrome slides into everyday lexicon" by Christine Van Reeuwyk. The article (which can be found here), starts out by stating "Victoria boy's bid to get word in the dictionary gains steam as focus shifts to the word." There are unique images of various bulletin boards from schools in the BC area with a levidrome theme (finding words, etc). They have links to their sister website (Oak Bay News) pointing to additional articles about Levi and his quest, also with unique images. The article closes off with references to some of the beers which are inspired by the word levidrome.
Mr. Richey at Rogers and Strawberry Vale schools started a contest and posted a bulletin board (see full image here. For several weeks students submitted levidromes and Mr. Richey posted them on this board. After several weeks of collecting levidromes, Mr. Richey tallied up all the submissions and awarded a prize to the student in each school who came up with the most levidromes.
Mr. Richey posted a tweet of his board on February 19, 2018.
William Shatner saw the tweet, and responded with his own tweet stating that it would be a wonderful challenge to other classrooms to do the same.
Here is a Video News clip of the quest to get Levidrome recognized. (Published Jan 29, 2018). The full news article can be viewed here
A really detailed submission of the word levidrome made it into the Wiktionary. The entry was submitted on January 28, 2018 by userid IQ125 with edits being performed on the same day by 3 additional contributors (Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV, Enginear and Equinox).
An additional edit appeared about one month later by userid "NadandoBot" on February 25, 2018. There is a definition, etymology, synonyms, references and an Anagram for levidrome. The definition which appears at Wiktionary states:
Levidrome (noun): A word with a new definition when the spelling is reversed; example pots - stop
Here is the CTV News article which was published on the CTV News website. We have a link to the video as well.
A Levidrome Song, published on YouTube by Lola Parks on Jan 1, 2018. Enjoy and sing along.
The Today website catches the story and encourages people to start using the word. The more the word is used, the more the likely the word levidrome will be accepted by the Oxford dictionary. Here is the link to Today - November 27, 2017 story, which includes an article and a video.
In the article, they mentioned schools and libraries have supported Levi's new word.
The Oxford Dictionary posts an article on their blog titled "Weekly Word Watch: levidrome, Oumuamua, and weaselflood" published by John Kelly.
In this article, Kelly mentioned about levidrome being a blend from Levi's name and palindrome. He also mentioned the boost in popularity the word levidrome received by the petition William Shatner sent to Oxford.
You can view the entire article here
Oxford responsed with a quick YouTube video from Rebecca, an editor at Oxford Dictionaries, published on November, 2017
The Toronto Star publishes the story of Levi and his invented word. They mention about support from William Shatner and Patricia Arquette. Here is the link to The Toronto Star - November 27, 2017 article.
The word levidrome started to become popular at the end of 2017. When an idea or project becomes popular and the internet community becomes aware, they start to purchase domains which are related to the idea. Here is a listing of some of the domains which were snapped up for various reasons.
End result, the internet community saw the potential of the word levidrome and acted on it.
Another celebrity likes levidromes. Olympic gold-medalist Simon Whitfield also recognized the word Levidrome, and tweets a couple of levidromes himself.
His Tweet goes:
@VancityReynolds #deadPOOL Loop is pool, pool is loop backwards, that's a #Levidrome - check out this video of the 6yr old trying to get his word into the dictionary. Link to Video
The word levidrome is submitted into the Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary by an anonymous user on November 14, 2017 at 13:10.
The Entry goes like this:
Levidrome(noun) : a word that when spelled backwards turns into a different yet valid English word
One classmate offered up "part" and "trap" as a levidrome on Friday - Jack Knox www.timescolonist.com, October 15, 2017
You can search for the definition yourself by visiting the Merriam-Webster site and enter in levidrome and perform a search.
Oxford dictionary was approached by high profile celebrity William Shatner. His tweet which can be seen here states:
Dearest @OxfordWords I just sent you an email about #Levidromes - a word that when spelled backwards, turns into a different yet valid english word for addition to your dictionary. Please see youtu.be/jpZ3bh1R6Kk for more info on this new exciting word! X O ! Bill
Oxford replies:
Thank you very much for your email to Oxford Dictionaries. We are always grateful to receive contributions and feedback, but because of the quantity of correspondence we receive, we are not in general able to reply personally to specific content comments or language queries. All submissions are passed on to our editorial team, who will take your comments into consideration when updating the dictionary data. Kind regards, The Oxford Dictionaries team
The word levidrome appears in the Urban Dictionary. The entry was submitted on November 3, 2017 by userid Hanashiate with the following definition:
levidrome
A word that when spelled backwards, turns into a different yet valid english word. They always come in pairs, for obvious reasons. Similar to a palindrome, but with different words instead of the same.
Maps <-> spaM
Desserts <-> stresseD
desserts and stressed are a pair of levidromes
This appears to be the first article which appeared on the internet after Levi's video appeared on YouTube. The article titled "Jack Knox: This Budd's for you, and he loves a "levidrome" states The dictionary adds words when they come into common usage. If levidrome becomes widely used, it's in. The article also dives into many other words which came into being that were named after their founders. Feel free to read the article. at the Times Colonist website
A Levidrome: a word that spells another word when spelled backwards! Let's get this word into the dictionary by sharing this video lots. The more people know it, the dictionary will accept it as a word! Wanna help? Share this vid on your social media! https://twitter.com/lucky_budd
If you watched the video of Levi in the back seat of the car asking about "What do we call it when STOP spells POTS backwards?", this scene was an re-enactment. The actual event occurred sometime in February, 2017.
Levidrome was coined later that day when Levi's parents determined that there was no word in any written dictionary for this linguistic phenomenon. He said, "Well then, we should name it after me! It should be a levidrome!" Levi was 5 at the time.
It was later confirmed when Levi's dad, "Lucky" Budd, contacted Webster's on Feb 19, 2017. Webster's got back to Budd to confirm that there was no word in their dictionary for this and a bit about how a word gets into the dictionary (explained in the YouTube video)
So levidrome was created and shared within the Budd family in early 2017. It wasn't until later on in the year when they released their video and unleashed Levi's word onto the internet.
Let's make this happen!
