Sdrawkcab Name - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Backwards Name

When someone has to think of a pseudonym for themselves, an oddly popular choice is their own name, but written backwards. You'd expect them to be more imaginative, and smart enough to realize that such a pseudonym can easily give away your true identity. Sure enough, most of the time someone notices.

On a technical note, this trope is much more interesting when, following the rules of English spelling, the sounds get transformed, rather than merely rearranged. Notice that the vowels in Ro-ti-art (oh, ee, ah) don't come close to those in Trai-tor (ey, er), and the syllables don't match. This effect is best achieved via letter combos that when flipped change their sound or their parsing (the way you divide them up). Besides, otherwise English spoken backwards sounds too fake.

Also note that some other languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, assign syllables to characters, so names "spelled" backwards become syllabilically reversed.

Sometimes, the reversed spelling is altered to look a little more plausible and/or be easier to pronounce, like "sdrawckab" instead of "sdrawkcab" - as "ck" is a digraph, this is arguably more correct. Another variation is to reverse the syllables instead of the spelling, which makes the derivation more obvious when the name is read out loud.

Compare Steven Ulysses Perhero. Sub Trope of Significant Anagram.