Ill

the above is a real word in the english language. pretty interesting

wonder if there are other words that are visually symmetrical or otherwise interesting. also depends on font choice

e.g. "tit" would be symmetrical if it was a different font than farcaster app

lol

^not a word but still counts maybe. looks like a person throwing up their arms

and unrelated but there's symmetrical fonts too (at the letter level) https://www.myfonts.com/es/pages/tags/symmetrical-fonts?srsltid=AfmBOoqt1hVU0amJWxtqDebbgn-tkIKEtH-WjKN9TWFmEsnnEBWtrkR-

ngl i had to ask quantgpt

> Key facts

claim	status	evidence
“ll” appears in mainstream English dictionaries	✔ abbreviation for lines, loose-leaf; also the contraction 'll for will (apostrophe often omitted in corpora)	￼
“ll” is not accepted as a playable Scrabble word under the main tournament lists	✔	￼
Palindrome ≈ sequence symmetry, regardless of glyph shapes	✔	standard definition; cf. math of palindromes
Visual symmetry is a graphic property; the technical term in typography is ambigram (mirror or rotational)	✔	￼
Only eleven Roman-caps letters have a vertical mirror axis in common fonts: A H I M O T U V W X Y	✔	￼

⸻

1  What you’ve observed
	•	“ll” is trivially graphic-symmetric: reflect it in a vertical mirror, nothing changes – each glyph is identical and their order is irrelevant.
	•	It also happens to be an accepted dictionary entry (though strictly as an abbreviation/contraction, not a lexical noun or verb).

So the word satisfies two different predicates:

predicate	test	“ll”
palindrome	s == reverse(s)	✔ (vacuously, any two equal letters)
vertical-mirror ambigram	mirror(glyphs) == glyphs	✔ (font permitting)

“racecar” passes the first test but fails the second because e, c and a have no vertical-mirror symmetry in most fonts – hence six’s counter-example.

⸻

2  Testing a visual symmetry hypothesis

Hypothesis: “Any English word composed solely of the 11 vertically-symmetric capital letters will be a vertical-mirror ambigram.”

Failure modes / hidden assumptions
	•	Typeface dependence: real fonts fudge symmetry (serifs, stroke weight). The hypothesis only holds for an idealised monospace sans-serif.
	•	Kerning & spacing: joining letters can create composite asymmetry (e.g. AVAVA may look lopsided).
	•	Lower-case glyphs differ: “ll” loses symmetry in fonts where l has a terminal stroke.

Empirical test plan
	1.	Choose a font (e.g. DejaVu Sans Mono).
	2.	Render candidate word as an image.
	3.	Flip image horizontally; compare pixel-for-pixel.
	4.	Record false positives/negatives → adjust glyph list. (Code sketch omitted for brevity; ask if you want a runnable notebook.)

⸻

3  Examples to illustrate the distinction

word	palindrome?	vertical ambigram?	notes
LL / ll	✔	✔	trivial repeat
WOW (caps)	✔	✔	each glyph symmetric
MOM	✔	✔	idem
TOOT	✔	❌ (T symmetric, O symmetric, but kerning breaks whole-word symmetry in most fonts)	
RACECAR	✔	❌	letters lacking symmetry
SWIMS	✔	180° rotational ambigram but not mirror	classic half-turn example

Alternative framing: instead of mirror ambigrams, study rotational ones (180° flip); the letter-set differs (N, S, Z, H, O, X, I work here).

⸻

4  Where next?
	•	Deeper exploration: automatically search corpora for “natural” ambigrams under different symmetry groups.
	•	Design angle: use calligraphic tweaks to turn non-symmetric words into custom ambigrams (see John Langdon’s work).
	•	Game design: create word-puzzles where players must build mirror-symmetric sentences with the 11 letters.

Let me know if you’d like code, more typography references, or a short list of mirror-symmetric English words longer than three letters.