You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language, and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

On our Facebook group, Teresa Abney posted about her new baby granddaughter, who was named after Teresa's late mother.

She writes, my mother's first name was Edna, which she hated, and her middle name was Marie.

In later years, my mother cleverly decided to go by Andy, which was her name spelled backwards.

And Teresa says, I have five sons, two of whom had daughters after my mom's passing, and both wanted to name their daughter after her.

Do reversals of name spellings happen regularly? Has it happened to you? And Grant,

there's a word for this kind of thing. It's an anadrome. It's a word that forms a different word

when spelled backwards. It's like the word palindrome, but it goes one way rather than both ways.

Right. So when you talk about names spelled backward, Edna becomes Andy, A-N-D-E, and I think of

Nevea, which was popular for a while, maybe it still is. That's Heaven spelled backward.

Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. We used to joke as a kid spelling our names backward and Grant is to Narg,

but nobody would use that. What else is out there? What else have people done?

A lot of people chimed in and said that they do know somebody whose name is a word spelled backwards.

D.D. Lloyd said, my niece, Noel was born in the spring, not at Christmas. She was named after her dad, Leon.

Oh, that's perfect.

Yeah, that's a nice one. And David Wright said, I have a second cousin who was named Terragam after her grandmother Margaret.

Okay.

And Kyla Thompson said, I had a family member named Delora.

That's a D-A-H-L-O-R-A-H.

They were planning on naming her Harold, so they went for the name backwards.

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