Grammar Girl here. I'm in Yon Fogarty, and today we're talking about words that do what they say,

and then we'll talk about why people can get confused about using the word myself.

This first segment is by Karen Lundy. Have you ever heard the term Samordnilap?

Sounds like a large fantastical beast you might find lumbering through a Dr. Seuss book, doesn't it?

But no, a Samordina lap isn't a creature.

It's a word that spells a different word when it's reversed.

Samordina lap backwards is palindromes.

One of my favorite examples is the word stressed. Backwards, it's desserts. I think we could all use

less of the former and more of the latter in moderation, of course. Samortnalap is what language nerds call autological.

Those are words that self-describe, where the definition of the word applies to the word

itself.

Autological comes from Greek, auto meaning self, and logos meaning word.

But wait, if Samordnalap is an autological word, how does it describe itself? Well, try thinking

if it reversed. It spells palindromes. So Samordinelap is not only a term for a word that spells a

different word backwards, it also is that kind of word. Here are a few other examples of autological words. Polysyllabic,

meaning having many syllables, has five. Or if you want to take it up another notch,

there's pentosyllabic. It means having five syllables and guess how many it has. Unhyphenated has no hyphen. Short is a short word.

Cesquipedelian means a very long word, and at 14 letters in five or six syllables,

depending on how you pronounce it, it absolutely is a very long word. And of course, there's an opposite term for words that don't

possess the property they describe, heterological. The same Greek roots, but in this case we start

with hetero, which means different or other. You could argue that most words are heterological,

but we tend to notice the ones that create a sort of paradox. We'll talk more about that in a moment. But before we do, let's go back to our first word.

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