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MYNANA

4/28/2020

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An ananym is a word created by reversing the lettering of another word - essentially a more constrained anagram. There are several cool ananyms out there that you may or may not have heard of:
  • An emirp is a term for a prime number that results in a different prime number when its digits are reversed
  • A semordnilap is similar to an ananym, but is specifically something that still makes sense when written backwards (like desserts/stressed)
  • The female given name Nevaeh is an ananym of heaven
  • Oprah's production company is called Harpo
  • There are a heck ton of geographic placenames that are just other nouns reversed, like the city of Anadac in Saskatchewan, or Saxet in Texas
The word ananym itself comes from Ancient Greek ana, meaning "backward", and nym, meaning "name". Here's some further reading, for those interested:
  • Wikipedia's list of ananyms
  • Wikipedia's list of geographic ananyms
  • An infographic I made on geographic anagrams/ananyms in the US
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    AUTHOR

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a senior studying government and linguistics at Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law. 
      If I don't cover it soon, I probably already did it
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