"Malayalam" turns out not to be a palindrome in Malayalam. This doesn't negate the shiny palindromicity in English. But I found it fascinating all the ways in which it fails in Malayalam orthography. It's written മലയാളം, and if that renders properly in your browser, you can see that it looks like it has six "letters" -- and they are all different. In fact a Malayalam-speaker would count that as four letters: മ-ല-യാ-ളം. They are pronounced, roughly, muh, luh, yaa, lum. The second and fourth letters would look more similar if they were the same kind of L, but they aren't -- the first is alveolar and the second is retroflex, and that distinction is important in Malayalam. That makes me wonder if there are long palindromic words in other languages. On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 2:31 AM Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> wrote:
It's the longest word whose reverse is a word: In[282]:= MaximalBy[DeleteCases[words, "MALAYALAM"], If[StringQ@# && MemberQ[words, Evaluate[StringReverse@#]], StringLength@#, 0] &] /@Range@6// tim
During evaluation of In[282]:= 4166.771102,6
Out[282]= {"DESSERTS", "DIORAMAS", "REDRAWER", "REWARDER", "SAMAROID", "STRESSED"}
W/o the Evaluate this took over 2.5 hrs.
In[295]:= WordDefinition@"samaroid"
Out[295]= {"pain caused by maple seeds at or inside the anal sphincter. Relieved by Preparation S."} —Bill _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun