Palindromes

"Ah, Satan sees Natasha"

"Do geese see God?"

"No devil lived on"

Noticed something weird about above sentences ? If not read the sentence from the end (forgetting the punctuations and spaces). You'll get the same sentence.These are named palindromes . More generally a palindrome is a word, phrase, number or other sequence of units that can be read the same way in either direction (the adjustment of punctuation and spaces between words is generally permitted) .

There are many types of palindromes.Most simple ones are the character by character palindromic words such as rotator,radar,racecar .The next type is the palindromic phrases given at the top.Following are some more examples.

"Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna"

"Rats live on no evil star"

"Step on no pets"

"Murder for a jar of red rum"

There are some word units which forms palindromic sentences.In this case the whole word should be taken in to consideration rather than individual characters.Following are some examples.

"Fall leaves after leaves fall"

"First Ladies rule the State and state the rule: ladies first"

"Please me by standing by me please"

"Blessed are they that believe they are blessed"

There are palindromic numbers and palindromic dates.And surprisingly there are palindromic names as well.Lon Nol (1913-1985) was Prime Minister of Cambodia. Nisio Isin is a Japanese novelist and manga writer.

Palindromes can be found in other languages as well.As an example words like "රතු වතුර" and "වඩු මඩුව" in sinhala are palindromic.The first ever historical palindrome was a latin graffiti which dates back at least to 79 A.D.

One may wonder about the usefulness of these palindromes (well, you can read these words or sentences from left to right or right to left with the same meaning ,which is an advantage :p ).But palindromes are very useful in the various fields such as maths ,microbiology and music.Especially in microbiology palindromes can be found in most genomes and genetic instructions.It is easy to handle palindromes due to their symmetry.

Searching and working with palindromes is an interesting thing to do.it is a fascinating area which creates the beauty of words.Some poets have tried to come up with palindromic poems as well.

There are hundreds of palindromes in English language and many of those can be found by a simple search in the internet.out of those the following palindromes are very famous.

"Able was I ere I saw Elba"

“Madam, I'm Adam”

and Eve's reply was, "Name no one man."

And finally let me finish this post with the most famous palindrome of the world,which has given rise to more similar palindromes.It was published in the November 13 1948 issue of "Notes & Queries" by Leigh Merce.

"A man, a plan, a canal – Panama."