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REVERSAL

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From: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language
Date: 19980101
Author:TOM McARTHUR

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 .

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