Palindrome Checker

Check whether a word or phrase reads the same backwards — and see which individual words in your text are palindromes too.

Your text

What to ignore
With all three ignore options on, only the letters and digits are compared.

Verdict

Type something on the left and the answer appears here.
0 Characters compared
0 Palindromic words
— Longest one
What was compared
The comparison appears here.
Palindromic words found
Words of three letters or more that are themselves palindromes will be listed here.
Nothing checked yet.

Private by design. This page has no backend. Your text is checked by JavaScript running on your own device and is never sent anywhere.

What counts as a palindrome

A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards. level is the simple case. Longer ones usually only work once you agree to ignore the spaces, the punctuation and the capital letters — A man, a plan, a canal: Panama is a palindrome as amanaplanacanalpanama, and nothing else. That is why the three ignore options exist, and why all three are on by default.

The three ignore options

Spaces and punctuation strips everything that is not a letter or a digit, which is the option that makes sentence-length palindromes work at all. Upper and lower case folds the text to one case, so a capital at the start of a sentence does not spoil the match. Accents on letters treats é as e, ü as u and so on; without it, a word like é…e would not pair up. Turn all three off and the comparison becomes literal: every space, comma and capital has to mirror as well.

Digits are kept, so 1221 and 12/02/2021 both check out.

Checking each line separately

Off by default, the whole box is treated as one long string. Turn it on and every line is judged on its own, which is the quick way to test a list of candidate words or dates in one go. The verdict then reports how many of the lines passed.

Palindromic words

Independently of the main verdict, every word in your text is checked on its own and the ones that are palindromes are listed. Single letters and two-letter pairs like aa are excluded — they are technically palindromes but they are noise — so the list starts at three letters. Each word is shown once, with how many times it occurred, longest first.

Where the answer disagrees with you

When the text is not a palindrome, the comparison box shows the normalised string against its reverse and names the first position where the two differ. That is usually enough to spot the stray letter, and it is more useful than a bare no.

Common uses

Settling an argument about a word, checking a puzzle answer, testing a phrase you have just composed, and finding the palindromes hiding in a longer piece of text.

How to use the Palindrome Checker

  1. Type or paste a word, phrase or sentence.
  2. Adjust the rules — ignore case, punctuation and accents as you like.
  3. See whether it reads the same backwards, plus any palindromic words inside it.

Frequently asked questions

Is 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama' a palindrome here?

Yes, once punctuation and case are ignored, which this tool does by default.

Does it find palindromes inside a longer text?

Yes. It also lists every individual palindromic word it finds in your text.

Are accents ignored?

You can enable accent folding so 'ete' and 'ete' with an accent are treated the same.