Alyssa Kramer can say any word backward. Assyla Remark nac yas yna drow drawkcacb. The 14-year-old from Poteau, Okla., can flip words around and spit them back out almost instantly -- it took me ...

“I always liked words,” he said. Except one: pugnacity. The noun knocked him out of the state spelling championship in the eighth grade. “That doggone word: P-U-G-N-A-C-I-T-Y, Y-T-I-C-A-N-G ...

Semordnilap is a word playfully coined by word-game lovers sometime in the mid-20th century.While a palindrome reads the same way backwards or forwards (otto, kayak), a semordnilap (itself a ...