In the autumn of 2017, six-year-old Levi Budd was riding in the back seat of his mom’s car in Victoria, British Columbia, when he noticed something about a stop sign. Read backwards, stop spells pots. He knew what a palindrome was — a word that reads the same backwards, like noon or kayak — but this was different. The word changed. So he asked his parents a question nobody had a good answer for: what do you call a word that spells another word backwards?
There wasn’t a word for it. The linguists had their technical terms, but everyday English had nothing. So Levi did what English has always done when it needs a word: he made one. Taking his own first name and the -drome ending from palindrome, he coined levidrome.
Most six-year-olds’ inventions stay in the kitchen. This one went further, because Levi’s family decided to campaign for it. The logic they got from the dictionary world was blunt: dictionaries don’t accept words because they’re clever. They accept them because people use them. Merriam-Webster’s message, relayed through the family, was essentially that the word needed to become popular. An editor at Oxford Dictionaries went further, telling Levi on social media that the word was “well on its way” and that if lots of people were still using it in a year or so, it might well make the dictionary.
So the family posted a short video of Levi explaining the word and asking viewers to use it, and the internet did what it occasionally does at its best: it said yes. The video picked up tens of thousands of views, and the campaign gathered a kind of momentum that money can’t buy — the endorsement of genuine delight. The actor William Shatner — Captain Kirk himself — threw his support behind the campaign on social media, and actress Patricia Arquette joined in. Newspapers picked it up: the Times Colonist ran the story in October 2017, The Star followed in November, and CTV News carried it into the new year. Schools and libraries in Ottawa, Toronto, and Calgary got in touch with levidrome projects of their own. Back in Victoria, the principal of Levi’s school took to greeting him at the crosswalk with her stop sign, asking what new levidromes he had found that day — stressed and desserts, drawer and reward, he would report.
Then the breweries noticed. Craft brewers are always hunting for novel names, and a word about words that read backwards was irresistible. After levidrome-themed beers appeared in Sweden and the United States, the family approached their hometown brewery, Phillips Brewing of Victoria, which released the Levidrome Imperial Regal Lager. The name was the joke and the proof at once: lager spelled backwards is regal.
Underneath the cute story is a serious question about how words get into dictionaries at all, and the levidrome campaign is an unusually clear illustration of the answer. Dictionaries are often imagined as authorities that hand words down from above, but the real process runs in the opposite direction. The big historical dictionaries were built by reading: the Oxford English Dictionary’s first edition was assembled with the help of hundreds of volunteer readers who mailed in quotation slips showing words in use. Modern dictionaries work the same way at higher speed, tracking large databases of published writing and admitting a word once it shows sustained, widespread use over time. That is exactly the bar the family was told about: make the word popular, keep it popular, and the dictionaries will follow. It is citizen lexicography, and a six-year-old stumbled into it by accident.
Eight years on, the scorecard is encouraging. The word has a Wiktionary entry — “a word with a different definition when the spelling is reversed” — with citations tracing it through the 2017 newspaper coverage and into a 2019 book on data and language. A community site keeps a running list and a news page, and marked the word’s eighth birthday in October 2025. Teachers still use the concept as a classroom hook. The big print dictionaries move on a timescale of years and decades, not months, and they have not formally opened the door yet — but every criterion they named is being met in public, one classroom project and one brewery label at a time. Levi, for the record, is a teenager now; the word he coined at six has outlasted most internet phenomena twice its age, and it is older than some of the students discovering it in classrooms today.
And that is the larger point. A six-year-old in Victoria spotted a gap in the language — a thing with no name — and named it. The machinery of dictionaries, celebrities, newspapers, and breweries then did what machinery does. But the essential act took about ten seconds in a car, and it belonged entirely to a kid who was paying attention.
And here is the part most people miss: the campaign is not over, and you are allowed to join it. The dictionary criterion was never complicated — use the word, keep using it, and the record will follow. Every teacher who puts levidrome on a whiteboard, every writer who drops it into an article, every parent who answers a back-seat question with it instead of a shrug, is a volunteer reader mailing in another quotation slip. Language is the only infrastructure project where the users are also the builders. Levi supplied the word at six years old. The rest of us supply the usage that turns a clever coinage into a permanent resident of the dictionary. That is a remarkably democratic deal, and it is still open.
That is why this site exists, in its small way: to keep the list, to keep the game going, and to keep looking both ways. Levi asked his question in 2017. The rest of us are still answering it, one backwards word at a time.