Original Palindromes Alphabetical

Seeds:  eirenic and other words ending in “nic”

The last terrific word I found that ends with nic, was titanic.

titanic cinatit

I used the Word Explorer to find the split c-ina-tit. The middle fragment contains the two consecutive words “in a.” The right fragment has fifty-eight matching words. Scanning that list, I stopped on titfer, a word I had heard but couldn't define until I looked it up. The bonus factor was how the reverse fit onto the left side of the palindrome. The only part I needed before titanic was ref.

Ref titanic in a titfer

Great. So what does titfer mean? That odd little word is from Cockney rhyming slang. Titfer is short for tit-for-tat, which rhymes with hat. So titfer means hat. Add barney and you have the sum total of my Cockney vocabulary.

For the illustration I chose the sport of baseball. The home-plate ref is the most iconic referee in all of sports, in my opinion. Other sports are awash in vertically striped shirts, but the jet black chest-protector-wearing umpire at home plate stands above them all.