Many of us have the “word of day” type emails that arrive in our in-box every morning. For readers and writers (and just plain ole’ word nerds), it is a way to broaden our vocabulary or to just give us a chuckle. With social media, this type of outreach has more avenues and applications for use. We have long enjoyed Merriam-Webster’s attempt on Twitter to educate the public during tenuous political issues and maybe poking a little fun at those in power along the way. The Scholarly Kitchen brought this very interesting information to our attention in their article, “The Backward Index — A Clever Pre-Digital Dictionary Hack.

Their latest educational offering is the Backward Index video series – a card catalog of every word in the dictionary spelled backwards. The Index offers a solution for editorial problems in a pre-digital era, particularly for finding related words or rhymes.

And leave it to Merriam-Webster to include the entertaining factor as well.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.