Visually symmetric words

There's also the niche use case of vertically arranged English letters — you see this once in a while on signage, but my favorite example is from _Street Fighter 3,_ where the character DeeJay has pants with "MAXIMUM" written down the leg, which means that you can flip the sprite (i.e. to have the character face left or right) and the word stays intact.

I once made a little puzzle that involves this idea: https://hcs64.itch.io/fitting-words

Treating 'u' and 'n' as symmetric is a bit cheating. Luckily, they are also rotationally symmetric words, like 'snus' and 'pod'.

There's an Swedish fantasy role playing game/novel[0] in which there's a city called HOXOH (all uppercase). It's also known as the "City of Illusions" and home to the magical Academy of Illusionists (who are often practicing their art in the streets). It was given its name partly due to the fact that the word could be read and mirrored in any direction without becoming distorted/assymetric.

[0] The RPG is called Drakar och Demoner (Dragons and Demons) and is roughly the Swedish equivalent of D&D, though it's actually based on the BRPG rules. The supplement that introduced HOXOH was eventually used as a basis for a series of (quite interesting) fantasy novels written by the very author that originally wrote the RPG supplement.

I don't see how you can allow lowercase "m" and "u" as symmetrical without also by the same principles including "n." In which case there are other words like "nun" and "non." Also "MAM" and "MOM" are symmetrical and are words (at least, Scrabble words. He only includes "MAAM" which oddly enough is not a Scrabble word.)

More along those lines here: http://www.fun-with-words.com/word_records.html

I didn't expect to be surprised by this! After thinking about it, it reminds me that game about reading some color names as fast as possible, where the names are painted with another color.

I always liked that "yeah" is point-symmetric if you pick the font right.

If 'm' and 'u' are symmetric, surely 'n' is as well?

UwU

Isn't also the lowercase l and mirror of the upper case I?

"racecar" is a palindrome that you cannot unsee.

The brand "newman" was a thing when I was a kid.

My mind got blown out the day someone made me notice you could rotate the logo 180 degrees and end up with the same logo.

Wikipedia has the official logo and animation showing it in action:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Man

You can take words that aren’t naturally symmetric and draw them symmetrically. You get ambigrams, like this:

https://scottkim.com/2020/07/17/origami/

Probably the most low-effort blog post I've read in a while

What about cursive, where mirroring/rotating does not even produce the same number of letters? (eg.: google love hate mirror image)

The name of one of the Indian languages "malayalam" is a palindrome, though not visually symmetric.

wow

poq bod dob qop

How about rotational symmetry?

  qp
  db

  pq
  bd