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A 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 "22/02/2022" and the sentence: "A man, a plan, a canal – Panama". 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.
The word palindrome was introduced by English poet and writer Henry Peacham in 1638.[1] The concept of a palindrome can be dated to the 3rd-century BCE, although no examples survive. The earliest known examples are the 1st-century CE Latin acrostic word square, the Sator Square (which contains both word and sentence palindromes), and the 4th-century Greek Byzantine sentence palindrome nipson anomemata me monan opsin.[2][3]
Palindromes are also found in music (the table canon and crab canon) and biological structures (most genomes include palindromic gene sequences). In automata theory, the set of all palindromes over an alphabet is a context-free language, but it is not regular.
- ^ Henry Peacham, The Truth of our Times Revealed out of One Mans Experience, 1638, p. 123 Archived 14 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Triantaphylides Dictionary, Portal for the Greek Language. "Combined word search for καρκινικός". www.greek-language.gr. Archived from the original on 6 May 2019. Retrieved 6 May 2019.
- ^ William Martin Leake, Researches in Greece, 1814, p. 85