Levidrome to inspire budding wordsmiths

It’s not often that a person’s name is part of a brand new word, that too a six year old. But if the child happens to be fascinated by words and their dynamics, then it is probably inevitable these days. And it is deservedly so in the case of Canada’s Levi Budd as he has noticed a lacuna that appears to have escaped the eagle eyes of grammarians and philologists for centuries: the lack of a word to describe words that spell other words when read backwards, such as stop and pots or diaper and repaid. Some wordsmiths do use ‘semordnilap’, or palindrome spelt backwards, for such words, but it is not a very elegant construction as most admit. By that coin, Levi and his parents’ offering of levidrome certainly sounds and looks better.

Of course, if it is finally enshrined in a dictionary after having swiftly made it to online versions, levidrome would be an eponym — a noun named after a person, of with examples such as boson, sandwich or odyssey abound in English. Technology has made it easier for new words to become au courant — a prerequisite for their inclusion in dictionaries — and the Budd family’s move of putting a video of their idea on the internet has led to it spreading across continents with unprecedented speed. If their gambit succeeds, it will certainly inspire other budding inventors of words to get cracking.