anadrome

Anadrome is a linguistic term describing a word that forms another valid word when its letters are read backward. A pair of such words is called an anadrome pair, and the two words in the pair are reversals of each other. This concept is distinct from a palindrome, where the entire string reads the same forward and backward, whereas anadromes yield two different words.

Common examples include drawer and reward, live and evil, and nametag and gateman. These pairs illustrate how reversing the letters of one word produces a different, legitimate word, rather than the original word itself. Anadromes are of interest to word game players, lexicographers, and language enthusiasts who study reversible word relationships.

Etymology and usage of the term are somewhat informal. The word anadrome is generally believed to be constructed from Greek roots such as ana- ('again' or 'back') and drome ('running' or 'course'), recording a sense of turning back to a linked word. The exact origin is not uniformly documented, and some references treat anadrome as a playful coinage rather than a rigorously defined linguistic category. Nevertheless, the concept has a stable place in puzzle literature and discussions of reversible wordplay.

In practice, anadromes are relatively rare in English, because many reversals yield nonsensical strings or nonwords. When they do occur, they are often highlighted as interesting curiosities rather than as a broad organizing principle of language. See also: palindrome, reversed word pairs.