Here’s a Puzzle for You to Solve

Sunday is drawing to a close. Tomorrow is Veterans’ Day — a holiday for many Americans. Oops! Correction: a holiday for many working Americans.

Are you game for giving those gray cells in your head a good exercise?

You are?

Good

See if you can solve this puzzle:

What do the following seven words have in common? 

1. Banana
2. Dresser
3. Grammar
4. Potato
5. Revive
6. Uneven
7. Assess

No cheating by peeking at the answer!

I’ll wait . . . .

Have you already given up?

C’mon! Give it another  try . . . .

Look at each word carefully.

You’ll kick yourself when you discover the answer. 

No, it is not that they all have at  least 2 double letters.

Give up?

Scroll down for the answer!

Answer:

For each of the seven words, if you take the first letter of each word and place it at the end of the word, and then spell the word backwards, it’s the same word.

In other words, all seven words are a variant of a palindrome – a word that spells the same forward or backward. An example of a palindrome is the name Bob.

The seven words of this puzzle all become palindromes when you move the first letter of each word to the end of the word.

Did you figure it out?

I did, after two tries: 

• I first thought the words all have the same number of letters. So I counted them: Banana (6); Dresser (7); Grammar (7); Potato (6); Revive (6); Uneven (6); Assess (6).  Nope, that’s not it.

• Then I thought maybe the words are palindromes. That’s when I saw that in each case, putting the first letter at the end, makes each word a palindrome.

H/t FOTM’s Wild Bill Alaska

~Eowyn