🔁Palindrome Checker

About this tool

Type or paste a word, phrase or number. The checker says whether it reads the same both ways, shows the cleaned text it compared, and points to the first mismatch if it doesn't. It also lists palindromes hidden inside your text. Tick Strict to compare every character exactly, including capitals and punctuation. A second panel runs the reverse-and-add process on any number.

What makes a palindrome

A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards. Single words such as level, racecar and rotator are the simplest. Phrase palindromes usually ignore capital letters, spaces and punctuation, which is how "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!" and "Was it a car or a cat I saw?" qualify. This checker removes accents as well, so the French "Ésope reste ici et se repose" counts. Numbers can be palindromes too, like 12321, and so can dates such as 22/02/2022 written in some formats. A long-standing puzzle uses them: take a number, add it to its reverse, and repeat until the result is a palindrome. 87 becomes 165, then 726, then 1353 and finally 4884 after four steps. Almost every number gets there quickly, but nobody has ever found a palindrome starting from 196, despite computers running the process for billions of steps; numbers like it are called Lychrel candidates. When a phrase isn't a palindrome, the tool shows the first pair of letters that don't match and searches for palindromic runs of three or more letters inside it, such as "racecar" or "Hannah" within a sentence. Honest limits: hidden palindromes are found across word boundaries, so some results combine the ends of neighbouring words, and emoji and symbols are ignored unless Strict is on. The reverse text tool flips text and the word counter counts characters.

Frequently asked questions