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Visually symmetric words

108 points| d4a | 3 years ago |johndcook.com

49 comments

order

scbrg|3 years ago

There's an Swedish fantasy role playing game/novel[0] in which there's a city called HOXOH (all uppercase). It's also known as the "City of Illusions" and home to the magical Academy of Illusionists (who are often practicing their art in the streets). It was given its name partly due to the fact that the word could be read and mirrored in any direction without becoming distorted/assymetric.

[0] The RPG is called Drakar och Demoner (Dragons and Demons) and is roughly the Swedish equivalent of D&D, though it's actually based on the BRPG rules. The supplement that introduced HOXOH was eventually used as a basis for a series of (quite interesting) fantasy novels written by the very author that originally wrote the RPG supplement.

zuminator|3 years ago

I don't see how you can allow lowercase "m" and "u" as symmetrical without also by the same principles including "n." In which case there are other words like "nun" and "non." Also "MAM" and "MOM" are symmetrical and are words (at least, Scrabble words. He only includes "MAAM" which oddly enough is not a Scrabble word.)

More along those lines here: http://www.fun-with-words.com/word_records.html

thaumasiotes|3 years ago

> He only includes "MAAM" which oddly enough is not a Scrabble word.

What's odd about that? ISNT, DONT, ARENT, COULDNT, SHOULDNT, none of them are Scrabble words. More generally, you're not allowed to misspell words in Scrabble.

squaredot|3 years ago

I didn't expect to be surprised by this! After thinking about it, it reminds me that game about reading some color names as fast as possible, where the names are painted with another color.

residualmind|3 years ago

I always liked that "yeah" is point-symmetric if you pick the font right.

larsrc|3 years ago

If 'm' and 'u' are symmetric, surely 'n' is as well?

croes|3 years ago

Isn't also the lowercase l and mirror of the upper case I?

shanebellone|3 years ago

"racecar" is a palindrome that you cannot unsee.

wunderbaba|3 years ago

Actually "butt tub" is a palindrome that you cannot unsee. Even at a young age I had a very sophisticated sense of humor....

diceduckmonk|3 years ago

I’ve seen it many times but had to reverify when seeing your comment.

TacticalCoder|3 years ago

The brand "newman" was a thing when I was a kid.

My mind got blown out the day someone made me notice you could rotate the logo 180 degrees and end up with the same logo.

Wikipedia has the official logo and animation showing it in action:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Man

rex_lupi|3 years ago

Probably the most low-effort blog post I've read in a while

Waterluvian|3 years ago

Funny enough, I came to the comments section to say how much I enjoy the occasional short post that touches on one thing and moves on.

I don’t need my life to be chock full of deep dives into ideas.

MontyCarloHall|3 years ago

Usually John Cook’s blog posts are extremely high quality, so I’ll give him a pass just this once.

pbnjay|3 years ago

Yeah… I was really interested in thinking about how to code a solution and then the post ended.

azatom|3 years ago

What about cursive, where mirroring/rotating does not even produce the same number of letters? (eg.: google love hate mirror image)

_448|3 years ago

The name of one of the Indian languages "malayalam" is a palindrome, though not visually symmetric.

jagged-chisel|3 years ago

According to the rules in TFA, this is indeed “visually symmetrical”

Edit: in uppercase only, I suppose

2devnull|3 years ago

wow

_448|3 years ago

The HN crowd does not have sense of humour:)

EGreg|3 years ago

poq bod dob qop

How about rotational symmetry?

  qp
  db

  pq
  bd

dcminter|3 years ago

Famously the Sun Microsystems logo had rotational symmetry! (While reading "sun")

layer8|3 years ago

Or vertical:

  p  q  y
  b  d  λ  ;)

arnarbi|3 years ago

“pod” is rotationally symmetric and in the dictionary.