Palindromes

30 Jan 2025 - sibaku

Kanji palindromes

Palindromes are words that read the same forward and backwards, like noon. In Japanese, words might be spelled with the same kanji from both sides, but they might be read differently, for example 日曜日 (にちようび). This list kind of fell out of finding semordnilaps, see this post.

This list was generated using the JMdict database JMdict.

Entries are grouped by length and sorted according to the average frequency of all entries mapping to the specific spellings, which can sometimes be multiple ones.

If you just want to see the list of words, have a look here: List

Limitiations

There is very limited processing during the generation and as such there are some limitations to keep in mind.

First of all, this list was created by a non-linguist Japanese learner based on things I found interesting or difficult during learning and might contain inaccuracies due to ignorance.

Western letters weren’t filtered out, so there are some English acronyms in there.

Some words share Kanji spellings, which might not be used generally, but those will be included as well. This shouldn’t cause issues aside from some additional meanings and readings showing up in some entries.

Similarly, while the entries are sorted by the average frequency (according to the nfxx field) of all associated words. This is neither the only nor the most sophisticted order. This only influences the list order though, so this shouldn’t cause any issues.

Word list

Total number of entries: 1747

Entries of length 2

Total number of entries: 451

Entries of length 3

Total number of entries: 87

Entries of length 4

Total number of entries: 1

Entries of length 5

Total number of entries: 3