A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters that reads the same forward and backward, ignoring spaces, punctuation, and capitalization. Common examples include "racecar", "madam", "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama", and the number "12321". Palindromes can be single words, entire sentences, or even longer texts.

Our palindrome checker works by first cleaning your input text - it converts everything to lowercase and removes all non-alphanumeric characters (spaces, punctuation, symbols). Then it compares the cleaned text with its reverse version. If they match exactly, the text is a palindrome. For example, "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" becomes "amanaplanacanalpanama", which reads the same forwards and backwards.

Some well-known palindromes include: "racecar", "madam", "level", "rotor", "civic", "refer", and the famous sentence "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama". Longer examples include "Able was I ere I saw Elba" and "Never odd or even". There are also palindrome numbers like 121, 1331, and 12321 that read the same forwards and backwards.

No, when checking for palindromes, capitalization, spaces, punctuation, and other non-alphanumeric characters are typically ignored. The checker focuses only on the letters and numbers. For example, "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" is considered a palindrome because when you remove spaces and punctuation and convert to lowercase, it becomes "amanaplanacanalpanama", which reads the same forwards and backwards.

Palindromes can be single words, phrases, sentences, or even entire paragraphs! The key requirement is that the sequence of characters (ignoring spaces and punctuation) reads the same forwards and backwards. Some of the most famous palindromes are actually complete sentences or phrases. The longest known palindrome in English is over 65,000 characters long, though most practical palindromes are much shorter.