The most familiar palindromes, in English at least, are character-by-character: the written characters read the same backwards as forwards. Palindromic words exist, for example civic, level, rotator, rotor, kayak, and racecar.
Palindromes often consist of a phrase or sentence ("Was it a rat I saw?", "Step on no pets", "Sit on a potato pan, Otis", "Lisa Bonet ate no basil", "Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas", "I roamed under it as a tired nude Maori"). Punctuation, capitalization, and spacing are usually ignored, although some (such as "Rats live on no evil star") include the spacing.[2]
The three famous English palindromes are "Able was I ere I saw Elba"[3] (which is also palindromic with respect to spacing), "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!”,[4] and “Madam, I'm Adam”.
Some people have names that are palindromes. Some changed their name in order to be a palindrome (one example is actor Robert Trebor), while others were given a palindromic name at birth (such as Neo-Nazi philologist Revilo Oliver and more than one man named Mike Kim[5]).