Palindromes

Look at a line from the story: "But that stupid man over the hill never even looked at my eyes."

Spell eye backwards: e-y-e. Exactly the same! A word that reads the same backwards and forwards is a palindrome.

It's not only single words: a palindrome can be a word, a phrase or a sentence.

Palindrome words are everywhere once you look:

• names: Naman, Nitin, Anna, Otto
• a language: Malayalam
• everyday words: level, radar, rotator, racecar, madam, noon, civic, kayak

Spot them in the book's sentences: "Naman saw a racecar at the show." "Nitin speaks in Malayalam." "The engineer used a rotator to check the surface level." "The pilot relied on the radar to navigate safely."

Now whole sentences! "Step on no pets" reads the same backwards, letter by letter. So does "Eva, can I see bees in a cave?" Famous ones: "Was it a car or a cat I saw?", "Madam, I'm Adam" and "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama".

The trick for sentences: ignore spaces, capital letters and punctuation. Read only the letters. Try making one yourself: start with a short word in the middle and build outwards!