Palindrome Checker

A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards — and once you start noticing them, they're everywhere: racecar, level, madam, noon, civic. Phrase palindromes like "A man a plan a canal Panama" and "Was it a car or a cat I saw" are the delightful longer form where the rule is respected across spaces and punctuation. This checker tests both, correctly.

The key is what gets ignored: spaces, punctuation and capitalisation are all stripped before comparing, because "racecar" and "racecar." and "Racecar" are all the same palindrome. Many casual checkers skip this stripping and reject perfectly valid palindromes for having a capital letter or a trailing period. The cleaned text and reversed version are shown so you can see exactly what's being compared — no black-box decisions.

Beyond checking a single input, the tool scans for palindromic words within a longer passage, showing which individual words read the same both ways. There are example phrases pre-loaded for quick exploration. Palindromes show up in wordplay, puzzles, coding interview questions, word games and — in a different form — in biology (DNA palindromic sequences) and music. The simplest definition, the hardest to make work in a sentence.