![]() ![]() The concept of a palindrome can be dated to the 3rd-century BCE, although no examples survive the first physical examples can be dated to the 1st-century CE with the Latin acrostic word square, the Sator Square (contains both word and sentence palindromes), and the 4th-century Greek Byzantine sentence palindrome nipson anomemata me monan opsin. The word palindrome was introduced by English poet and writer Henry Peacham in 1638. The 19-letter Finnish word saippuakivikauppias (a soapstone vendor), is the longest single-word palindrome in everyday use, while the 12-letter term tattarrattat (from James Joyce in Ulysses) is the longest in English. In the pre-digital era, how else could we have ascertained that there are some 500 words in the dictionary that end in –ology? that the third English word ending in –shion, after cushion and fashion, is fushion (a rare variant of foison)? that publicly is the only adverb that now more commonly ends in -cly than in -cally? or that there is a third word in English ending in -gry?Īs a colleague in our electronic publishing department remarked after hearing a description of the Index, "These people wanted a computer.The 4th-century Greek palindrome: ΝΙΨΟΝ ΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΗ ΜΟΝΑΝ ΟΨΙΝ ( Wash your sins, not only your face), at the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.Ī palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of symbols that reads the same backwards as forwards, such as madam or racecar, the date and time 12/21/33 12:21, and the sentence: "A man, a plan, a canal – Panama". Responding to the many letters (now mostly e-mails) that we receive every week sometimes presupposes a freakish omniscience of the dictionary. Answering unpredictable questions from the public turned out to be another use of the Index. The Backward Index was also useful for those "I-know-there's-a-word-for-that" moments a colleague trying to remember the name of a particular phobia found it by looking up the listings at aibohp. Since rhymes depend on word endings, initial research for a rhyming dictionary also made use of the Index, where sequences such as seepy, steepy, weepy, sweepy and dorty, forty, shorty, snorty, porty, sporty, rorty, torty show up regularly. Thus, looking up all the diseases that end in –itis or all the doctrines and theories that end in –ism was now possible. For example, it could help identify a set of related terms that should be defined in similar ways, including open compounds ( Highland pony, Shetland pony, Welsh pony), closed compounds ( blocklike, clocklike, rocklike, socklike, chalklike), and morphologically related terms ( phytopathological, ethological, lithological, ornithological). The Backward Index evidently turned out to be a useful tool in the pre-electronic age. Words ending in e alone take up 23 boxes. The yellowed label on the end of each box is marked "Backward Index." There are about 315,000 slips in total, filling 129 file boxes. They occupied a card catalog on the editorial floor at Merriam-Webster until the mid-1990s, when they were transferred to cardboard file boxes and moved to shelves that fill a wall in the building's basement. Hundreds of thousands of such slips were eventually produced. So as work on the Third was winding down Gove set the typing staff to the task of creating a 3"x5" slip for virtually every word that appeared in boldface in the dictionary typed backward, each letter followed by a space (and spelled normally, without the extra spaces, below its backward spelling). Though he could never have imagined search as we know it today, he would have been among the first to intuit its uses for lexicographers. He was a linguist who used the logic of a programmer long before the days of personal computing, and in the 1950s and '60s he seems to have been thinking about the dictionary with the extreme rigor of a software engineer. Editor-at-Large Peter Sokolowski takes a look into the Backward Index. ![]() The first step: Type all of the words in the dictionary backwards. Philip Gove, editor of Merriam-Webster's Third Unabridged, had a faster way. ![]()
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