REVERSAL

views updated

REVERSAL, also retronym. Semitechnical terms for a word that spells another word backwards: doom, straw. Deliberate reversals form a new word: the trade name Trebor; the BrE slang yob (‘a backward boy’: a lout). Such reversals are sometimes used for effect in utopian and satirical writing, such as Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon (1872), set in a land where Victorian ideas and values are reversed. Erewhonians have such names as Yram and Nosnibor.

More From encyclopedia.com