Website of Gerald M. Berns

A palindrome is a sequence of words whose letters are the same backward as forward. Note that this definition does not mention making sense. Few palindromes make sense, fewer still make sense and are grammatically correct sentences, and even fewer sound right to the ear. The longer a palindrome is, the less likely it is to make sense. And the longest palindromes, which run into the tens of thousands of words, make no pretense of making sense.

For this reason, pursuing the longest palindromes may seem silly, because they convey no meaning and because there is no limit to how long a palindrome can be. In the reductio ad absurdam case, palindromes like “radar radar radar …” can repeat forever.

Pursuit of the longest palindrome, whose only value is that it exists, would be a more serious endeavor if standards governed it. Currently, there are none. Therefore, to bring discipline to this strictly intellectual pursuit, I propose the following standards for contenders for the title of Longest Palindrome:

• All words used (except the first word and “I”) must be in lower case; no proper nouns or initials are allowed
• No word may appear twice in succession
• No phrase (couplet) may recur
• No word may comprise more than 1.00% of the whole
• A palindrome may not be comprised of other palindromes, but one-word palindromes (like “a,” “bob,” and “deed”) are allowed
• No abbreviations
• No word may have simplified spelling (like “tho” or “thru”)
• Common contractions minus their apostrophe (like “didnt”) are allowed
• Commonly hyphenated words minus their hyphens are allowed (like “bullseye” and “crisscross”)
• For English language palindromes, both American and English spellings are allowed
• All words, including slang, loan words, and acronyms, must be thesaurus- or dictionary-based

My Palindrome Checker program (see below) checks palindromes for adherence to the first five proposed standards.

With such standards, generating the longest palindrome becomes more like finding long prime numbers, pursuing the longest explication of π and e, lifting the most weight, jumping the farthest, and climbing the tallest mountain — all of which have value to their practitioners, if not to anyone else.

	Click here to download what I believe is the world’s longest English language palindrome (31,358 words, 119,180 letters), the vocabulary it uses, and the Palindrome Checker’s analysis of it. It conforms to the proposed standards.
	This palindrome conforms to a superset of the proposed standards: each word in it appears just once. I believe that it is the world’s longest English language palindrome (2,971 words, 14,811 letters) of this type. Click to download it, its vocabulary, and the Palindrome Checker’s analysis of it.
	Click here to download my Palindrome Maker V1.11, the same program used to generate the longest palindromes.
	Click here to download my Palindrome Checker. This program certifies palindromes, checks them for adherence to the first five proposed standards, and provides other information about them.