Every palindrome in our word list, by length
A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards. Our dictionary holds 101 of them, out of 168,401 words in total, from two-letter pairs up to a handful of 7-letter words. Every count here is letters, not sounds or spaces, and the search is bounded by our word list's own 2-to-15-letter range, so "longest palindrome" below means the longest one our dictionary contains, not a claim about English generally.
Palindromes by length
Short palindromes are easy — doubling one letter or mirroring three is nothing. Long ones are rare, because every extra letter doubles the coincidence required:
| Length | Palindromes |
|---|---|
| 2 letters | 2 |
| 3 letters | 49 |
| 4 letters | 12 |
| 5 letters | 24 |
| 6 letters | 7 |
| 7 letters | 7 |
Why length matters so much
An odd-length palindrome has one letter sitting alone in the centre, free to be anything at all; every other position is locked to match its mirror on the other side. An even-length palindrome has no free letter whatsoever — every single position is mirrored, which is why the shortest possible palindrome is just one letter typed twice. Each extra pair of positions is another coincidence the word has to survive while still meaning something, which is exactly why the counts in the table above fall away so fast as length grows: 49 at three letters falls to 12 at four, then 24 at five.
Five-letter palindromes
Long enough to matter for a five-letter word guess too. A sample, common ones first:
The two-letter palindromes
A two-letter palindrome can only be the same letter written twice. Our list has 2:
The three-letter palindromes
The largest single group in the table, and the easiest length to spot in the wild — a vowel or consonant with a matching pair either side:
The longest in our list
At 7 letters, the dictionary holds exactly 7:
None of these is obscure by accident — surviving a symmetric constraint on both halves and still meaning something is a hard combination to pull off. A longer genuine English palindrome may well exist beyond our 15-letter ceiling; we can only report what is in our own list.
How many are everyday words
22 of the 101 palindromes in our list — 22% of them — are common, everyday words; the rest are the short interjections, dialect terms and inflections that make up the quieter corners of any word-game dictionary. Common ones first:
A note on isograms
Palindromes and isograms sit at opposite ends of the same idea. No palindrome longer than a single letter can also be an isogram, because a palindrome always repeats its outer pair of letters with each other — precisely what an isogram forbids. See our isograms guide for the words that never repeat a letter at all.
Finding one yourself
A palindrome in your rack rarely announces itself — the letters look ordinary in isolation. Run any set of letters through the word unscrambler and check whether a result reads the same in reverse, or browse the complete words-by-length lists to scan a length for yourself.