What do you call a word that spells something different when written backwards? Stumped? That’s because there isn’t a word for that, but little Levi Budd wants to change that.
The boy from Canada recently realized there wasn’t a word for this in a now-viral video his parents shared on YouTube. "Mom, I see that 'stop' spells 'pots' backwards," Levi says. "That's not a palindrome. What do we call a word like that ... where a word spells another word backwards?"
After talking about examples of it, like flow/wolf, loop/pool, the family left it up to the clever kid to come up with a name for it, so he named it after himself. Now they’ve started a social media campaign promoting the use of “levidrome” and even actor William Shatner is on board. He’s reached out to the folks at the Oxford English dictionary to have it added, and it might actually happen.
“Levidrome” is on this week’s Oxford Word Watch list. And in a response to Levi, the organization explains, “Lots of people know your word and know what it means, which means 'levidrome' is well on its way into our dictionary."
Source: Today