5-Letter Palindrome Words — All 35, With Meanings

Why only 35 five-letter palindromes exist in a 12,478-word dictionary

The number is small for a reason that is pure arithmetic, and once you see it the figure stops feeling mysterious. A five-letter palindrome has the shape A B C B A. The first letter must equal the fifth, and the second must equal the fourth. That leaves only three positions free, so there are 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576 possible palindromic letter strings in total, and every one of them has to be a real English word to count.

Compare that with the shape of the ordinary dictionary. A five-letter word has five free positions, which gives 26^5 = 11,881,376 possible strings, and 12,478 of them happen to be words. Palindromes are the same game played with three quarters of the board removed. The English language has 12,478 five-letter words and 35 five-letter palindromes, so the palindrome constraint is roughly 356 times as strong as the general "is this a word at all" constraint.

It helps to put the three structural lists side by side, because they are nested rather than separate. Requiring only that the first letter equals the last leaves 691 words. Requiring that at least one letter appears twice leaves 4,465. Requiring that all five letters be different leaves 8,013. A palindrome forces both a repeat and a mirror at once, so it is the smallest of the four sets by a wide margin.

There is a second, subtler reason the number is small, and it is about what English does with the ends of words. A word that starts and ends with the same letter almost always does so because a short stem has picked up a suffix that happens to reproduce the opening letter — a plural or an inflection, or a word that simply grew a letter at the front and the back for its own reasons. Those words are rare to begin with, and the palindrome asks for the mirror as well, so you are looking at the intersection of two thin sets.

The complete list of 35 five-letter palindrome words

Here is every one of them. The meanings below are the ordinary dictionary senses; where a word is a plural, a Scots form or a loanword rather than modern everyday English, the status column says so plainly. Read down the list and you can see the shape of the whole phenomenon: real English words at one end, and a long tail of forms that exist because a game lexicon keeps them.

A word of caution about the senses above. For the seven or eight that a modern speaker would recognise, the gloss is straightforward. For the rest — the Scots forms, the Latin plurals and the loanwords — the dictionary entry is recording a usage that English has moved on from. Treat those rows as a lookup rather than a definition, and remember that a word can be entirely legal in a game and entirely unusable in conversation.

The eight everyday palindromes, and the five that have been published answers

The interesting split inside the 35 is not alphabetical. It is between the words a speaker reaches for without thinking and the words that exist because a lexicon keeps them.

This site keeps a separate list of 1,170 everyday five-letter words, drawn from ordinary usage rather than from the game lexicon. Five of the 35 palindromes are in that everyday list: CIVIC, LEVEL, RADAR, REFER and STATS. Add the published daily answers to the test and you get seven: KAYAK and MADAM join the five. The other 28 are Scrabble and crossword vocabulary only.

Five palindromes have been published answers in the daily five-letter game, and the dates are worth looking at. CIVIC was the answer on 23 September 2021. MADAM was the answer on 11 July 2022. KAYAK was the answer on 21 April 2023. REFER was the answer on 19 July 2024. LEVEL was the answer on 15 August 2025. That is exactly one palindrome per year for five consecutive years, a run of five out of the 1,994 published answers, or 0.25% of the answer history.

That is a smaller share than you might expect from a shape this distinctive, and the reason is instructive. An answer that reads the same backwards is a harder word to guess, and a palindrome also carries a doubled letter, which means it plays by the awkwardest rules in the game. The published answer pool leans towards words that are easy to attack: words with a green-friendly first letter, a common vowel pattern and no repeated tile. PALINDROME and LEVEL happen to be friendly enough; KAYAK and MADAM are friendly enough; DEKED and TOROT are not.

For the endgame, though, the fact that five palindromes have been published is a genuine edge. If you have played a daily game down to a handful of candidates and one of them is RADAR, you can narrow immediately: only five of the 35 have ever been an answer, and RADAR is not one of them. A palindrome-heavy guess set is a small set, and the odds that the answer is one of the seven well-known ones are better than the odds that it is one of the 28 that only a solver would produce.

The middle letter is the nucleus, and it shows

Every five-letter palindrome reads as a three-letter frame wrapped around a single centre letter, and that centre letter has to carry the syllable. In the middle position of the 35, L appears five times, R four times, M four times, A three times and D three times. V and N appear twice each. Every other letter appears once or not at all.

The vowel count follows the same pattern. Twenty-eight of the 35 contain exactly two vowels, which is the ordinary English default for a five-letter word. Three contain three vowels: ALULA, ANANA and KAIAK, and all three have a doubled vowel as well, which is why they score so little. Four contain exactly one vowel: SHAHS, STATS, STETS and STOTS, all of them built on a syllable carried by the A with a cluster around it.

That last group is the one worth flagging for a guessing game, because a one-vowel palindrome is a much narrower shape than it looks. STATS is the one most players know, and SHAHS is the one most players do not. If a board has told you that the answer has one vowel and reads the same backwards, your realistic candidates are STATS, SHAHS, STETS and STOTS, and SHAHS is the one that catches people out.

Why palindromes score so little in Scrabble

The average Scrabble value across the 35 palindromes is 7.40 points, against 9.17 for the full 12,478-word dictionary. Palindromes are, on average, the cheapest words in the five-letter list.

The reason is visible in the score distribution. Fourteen of the 35 are worth exactly 5 points, which is the floor for a five-letter word made entirely of one-point letters. Another three are worth 6 and six more are worth 7. Only nine palindromes score 8 or more. At the top, KAYAK is worth 16, because the two As and the K make it expensive: K is a 5-point letter and A is 1, and the word has three letters worth more than one point. KAIAK follows at 13, SEXES and CIVIC at 12, and SHAHS and DEKED at 11.

So a palindrome is a cheap word with an occasional expensive exception, and the exception comes from the same place every time: a rare consonant or a rare vowel sitting in the middle. KAIAK gets its 13 from the K and the two A-tiles; SHAHS gets its 11 from the H and the S; CIVIC gets its 12 from the two V tiles.

For a Scrabble player, the practical use of this list is not scoring. It is unblocking. If you are holding a rack with two of the same letter and a spare V, C or H, the palindrome list is a short catalogue of legal plays that use the duplicate and the awkward tile at once. The Scrabble solver handles rack and square values; this list narrows the field first.

What a palindrome tells you in a guessing game

Here is the catch, and it matters every time you consider guessing one of these words.

A five-letter palindrome necessarily contains a repeated letter. Its first and fifth letters are the same, and its second and fourth letters are the same. So every one of the 35 is also a double-letter word, and in a daily five-letter game the duplicate rule applies to every one of them: if your guess contains a letter the answer holds only one copy of, the second tile comes back grey even though the letter itself is present.

Look at the eight palindromes you would actually think of using as a guess. RADAR has two As, REFER two Es, ROTOR two Os, TENET two Es, CIVIC two Cs, LEVEL two Es and two Ls, MADAM two As, STATS two Ts. Guessing LEVEL tests three distinct letters, not five, and the second E and second L come back grey. Guessing RADAR tests four distinct letters. Guessing TENET tests three.

There is a second structural payoff, though, and it is a real one. Because a palindrome answer is symmetrical, its feedback is symmetrical too. If you guess DEWED against a palindrome answer, the tile in position one and the tile in position five always come back the same colour, because the answer has the same letter in both positions. That halves the number of distinct feedback patterns any palindrome guess can produce, which makes a palindrome guess a good way to test several letters at once — just not a good way to learn about a doubled letter twice.

The sensible way to use this list is therefore as a filter rather than an opener. If you have a reason to believe the answer is a palindrome, your search space has just collapsed from 12,478 words to 35, and you should pick from those 35 with whatever else you know. If you have no reason at all, then a palindrome is a poor first guess: it is a word most players will not think of, it is a doubled guess, and it teaches you less about the shape of the answer than a common vowel would.

Where it does pay is in the endgame, and only if you have already eliminated the ordinary candidates. If the board has narrowed to a handful of words and a palindrome is still possible, the candidates are so few that you can test them one at a time. The Wordle solver applies the duplicate-letter rule to your actual board feedback, which is the right tool once you have real tiles to work with.

Palindromes and semordnilaps: the same trick in reverse

A palindrome reads the same backwards as itself. A semordnilap reads backwards as a different, equally valid word. The name comes from the French "semordnilap", which is "palindrome" spelled backwards.

This site's dictionary contains 386 five-letter semordnilaps. Here is a sample of the cleanest ones, where both halves are ordinary English: DEBUT and TUBED, GNOME and EMONG, DENIM and MINED, DEVIL and LIVED, REBUT and TUBER, SPEED and DEEPS, SWORD and DROWS, LEVER and REVEL, SLEEK and KEELS, DECAF and FACED, TIMER and REMIT, CAMUS and SUMAC, SERIF and FIRES, STATE and ETATS.

There is no overlap between the two sets. A palindrome is never a semordnilap, because its reverse is itself rather than a different word. The semordnilaps are, in one important sense, the harder set to find: a palindrome announces itself the moment you write it down, whereas a semordnilap only reveals itself if you happen to think of the reverse first. That is exactly what makes them good crossword material and bad guessing material.

They have turned up in the published daily answers more often than palindromes have. 53 of the 1,994 published answers are semordnilaps, against 5 palindromes — more than ten times as many. The list includes DENIM, DEVIL, GNOME, LEVER, OFFER, REBUT, REVEL, SENSE, SLEEP, SMART, SPEED, STATE, SWORD, TIMER, TRAIL and TROOP, among others.

One more thing about the semordnilap set: it is heavily weighted toward S. 278 of the 386 contain an S, because S is both a common ending and a common beginning, and words that start and end with the same letter cluster around it. The same-letter-at-both-ends list covers that 691-word set, which is the pool a semordnilap is drawn from.

The scope selector at the top of this page lets you switch between the 35 palindromes, the 386 semordnilaps and the whole dictionary, so you can check all three figures yourself rather than taking them on trust.

Where palindromes earn their keep

Three practical uses, in rough order of how often they come up.

Themed grids. Palindromes are a natural theme because there are so few of them that the theme stays coherent. A grid built entirely from the 35 will use the same handful of shapes over and over — A B C B A — which is a constraint a setter can work with because every entry crosses its mirror partner. The crossword puzzle maker on this site will generate a grid you can then fill with these words.

Word searches. A palindrome is the only word a word-search generator can hide twice without you noticing, because it reads the same in both directions. That is either a problem or a joke depending on what you are building. For a themed grid it is a feature; for a standard hidden-word puzzle it is a duplicate you did not intend. The word search maker is the tool for building the grid itself.

Letter games. In a Boggle-style grid, a palindrome is a high-value find: it is five letters, it is real, and it is a word a casual player will not have spotted because they will be looking for words that read normally left to right. For the same reason, palindromes make good answer candidates in a word-chain or word-rotation game, where the same letters have to come back round.

Guessing games. The weakest use, for the reasons in the previous section: every palindrome is a doubled-letter guess and most players will not have it in mind. Use it as a filter, not as an opener.

How to use this list in practice

A short sequence for each situation.

Guessing. If you suspect the answer reads the same backwards, set the scope selector to the palindrome list and work through the 35. Cross off the ones you can eliminate with what the board has already told you. If you have ruled out E, you are down to 17; rule out a second vowel and you are down to a handful. The "Must include these letters" box handles the second step — type a letter twice if the word must carry two copies of it.

Building a themed grid. Sort the list Z–A to work from the back of the alphabet, or click a starting-letter chip to see one letter's worth of options. Because every word is A B C B A, you can lay out a set of entries that mirror each other deliberately, which gives a grid a symmetry a normal fill will not have.

Scrabble. Filter by the letter you are short of, check the Scrabble score in the table above, and play the highest one your board allows. Remember that a palindrome always repeats a letter, so it is a genuine find from a rack holding a duplicate.

For everything that is not about letter shapes, the complete five-letter word list is the right starting point, and the site's five-letter word generator will work from a pattern such as _E__E. The double-letter list covers all 4,465 words where a letter appears more than once, which includes every palindrome on this page and many more.

What this list is, and what it is not

Two limits, stated plainly.

First, this is the site's own dictionary of 12,478 valid five-letter words, and that list is built for word games rather than for conversation. It includes Scots forms like DEKED and DELED, Latin plurals like SEDES and SERES, and loanwords like LEMEL and KAIAK. If you want everyday five-letter words with their meanings, the full five-letter index is the honest place to look. If you specifically want the palindrome corner of the lexicon, this is the accurate version of it.

Second, it is not an answer list for any particular daily game. The published answer set is 1,994 words drawn from a much more mainstream vocabulary, and only five of them are palindromes. A word on this page is a legal guess. Whether it can be the answer is a separate question, and this list does not answer it.