Palindrome Checker

Two readings of the same question

"Is this a palindrome" has two answers, and which you want depends on whether you are writing a puzzle or a program.

The relaxed reading ignores case, spaces and punctuation. This is what people mean in ordinary use, and the only reading under which the famous sentence-length palindromes qualify at all — every one of them relies on the spaces falling in different places forwards and backwards.

The strict reading compares the text exactly as typed. Only single words and deliberately constructed strings pass. It is the reading you want when the palindrome is a data format rather than a piece of wordplay — a numeric ID, a sequence, a test fixture.

Word-level palindromes

There is a third kind this tool does not test: sentences that read the same backwards word by word rather than letter by letter. Those are a separate puzzle form with their own constraints, and a letter-based checker will always call them false.

Related

A semordnilap is a word that spells a different word backwards — stressed and desserts, drawer and reward. To hunt for those, reverse the word and check it in the Word Finder, or search the word lists for the reversed spelling.