Palindrome Checker
Check if any word, phrase or number reads the same backwards.
Overview
A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards. The checker tells you whether your input qualifies, and offers options for how strictly to interpret it: case-sensitive or not, with or without ignoring spaces and punctuation, and with or without ignoring diacritics.
Word puzzlers, poetry workshops, math teachers exploring numeric palindromes, and programmers debugging string-reversal logic all reach for it. It's also a fun way to test whether a phrase like "A man, a plan, a canal — Panama" actually works (it does).
How it works
The tool normalizes the input according to your chosen options — lowercasing letters, stripping non-letters, decomposing accents — then compares the cleaned string to its reverse. If they match, it's a palindrome. The display highlights the comparison so you can see exactly which characters were considered.
Examples
Input: racecar
Output: Palindrome
Input: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama
Cleaned: amanaplanacanalpanama
Output: Palindrome
Input: Hello
Output: Not a palindrome
Input: 12321
Output: Palindrome
FAQ
Are spaces and punctuation considered?
By default they're ignored, which lets sentence palindromes like "Was it a car or a cat I saw?" register. Switch to strict mode if you want exact character-for-character matching.
Does case matter?
By default no — case is folded. Strict mode treats "A" and "a" as different characters.
What about numbers?
Numeric palindromes like 12321 work the same way. Negative numbers can't be palindromes in strict mode because the minus sign breaks the symmetry.
Are there famous long palindromic sentences?
Yes. "A man, a plan, a canal — Panama" and "Madam, in Eden, I'm Adam" are classics. Demetri Martin once wrote a 224-word palindrome.