Express Publishing (ELT)

1. What is a palindrome?

A palindrome is a word or phrase which is the same spelt backwards, (“Eve” / “Madam I’m Adam”) so what is the word for a word which is another word spelt backwards?

Such a word could be called a semi-palindrome or half-palindrome. The sentence “rats live on no evil star” is full of these semi-palindromes. Check out weird Al on YouTube for a spoof of a Bob Dylan song consisting entirely of semi-palindromes.

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Here’s Bill Bryson on the word set. “Superficially it looks like a wholly unassuming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb and 10 as a participle adjective. Its meanings are so varied and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words – the length of a short novel – to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.”

So set is a polyseme. – a word with many meanings. Now here’s a contronym: the word cleave. This can be to cut in half or stick together. Sanction means permission or forbiddance. If you wind up a watch, you start it, but if you wind up a meeting, you end it. This can be confusing.     read more >>

Every culture has its proverbs, sayings and clichés expressing the way of the world.     read more >>

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing – especially when it comes to spelling.

The English word most commonly misspelt in published documents and on the internet is supersede, an analysis by lexicographers has found. But it is not pure ignorance that leads many of us to get it wrong. Rather, the problem is that many of us know a little bit too much.     read more >>