Learn English – n online dictionary listing words spelled in reverse

orthography

A final "s" in a word is usually pronounced \z\, so it is an interesting that the final "z" in "quartz" is pronounced \s\. (I mention interesting quirks like this to my ESL students.) I was wondering if there were any other instances like "quartz". If an on-line dictionary in ordered by the last letter of the word existed, this would be easy to check for, but the concept of a "reverse dictionary" seems to be limited to the (very useful) idea of going from definition/concept to headword. Searching for "dictionary in alphabetical order by the last letter" didn't seem to get me anywhere, but maybe I haven't searched diligently enough.

Best Answer

Summary: Try this word list (2.4 MB) I just made.

I don't know of any such dictionaries, but it's easy enough with a little scripting to refashion any dictionary/word-list, available in an accessible electronic format, into what you want.

For instance, this script (in Python)

import sys
words = [w.strip() for w in sys.stdin.readlines()]
words = sorted(words, key = lambda w: ''.join(reversed(w)))
print '\n'.join(words)

run on the word list /usr/share/dict/words that ships with Unix systems gives this word list (2.4 MB). It takes a while to get the hang of looking up words in such a list, of course, because you have to read the words backwards. The string "quartz" occurs as part of words far apart, for instance:

…
propertyless
quartzless
mess
…
ritzy
quartzy
Shortzy
…
waltz
speltz
Fultz
Nantz
chintz
untz
wootz
quartz
biquartz
hertz
bortz
halutz
chalutz

I think what you actually wanted was just a word list rather than a dictionary, but it is also easy enough, equipped with a good free dictionary, to turn it into a dictionary in alphabetical order of the reversed words.

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