Palindromes, Reversed Text and Morse Code Explained

A few of the text tools on this site are mostly for fun, but each one rests on an interesting idea about how characters and signals work. This guide covers four of them.

Palindromes

A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards. Racecar and level are words, 12321 is a number, and Never odd or even is a phrase. Phrases only work if you ignore spaces, capital letters and punctuation, which is why "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" counts. The Palindrome Checker lets you turn each of those options on or off for a strict test, and shows the longest palindrome hiding inside text that isn't one.

Reversed text

The Text Reverser can flip a whole string, reverse each word, or reverse the order of the words. People use it for puzzles, for spotting patterns in codes, and for quick tests of programs that handle text. Be careful with emoji and accented letters, which are made of more than one piece, because a naive reversal can split them.

Morse code

Morse code spells letters with short and long signals, called dots and dashes. SOS is three dots, three dashes and three dots. The timing is fixed: a dash lasts three times as long as a dot, the gap between parts of a letter is one dot, the gap between letters is three dots, and the gap between words is seven dots. The Morse Code Translator turns text into dots and dashes and back.

Fancy text and its limits

The Fancy Text Generator swaps letters for lookalike characters from other parts of Unicode, such as bold, italic and script forms. They are fine for a social media bio, but keep a few cautions in mind:

• Screen readers may read the letters aloud as odd names, or skip them.
• Some fonts and apps show empty boxes for rare characters.
• Search engines and search boxes may not match fancy letters to normal ones.
• Avoid it for usernames, passwords, names on forms and anything people must be able to find.