Many ambigrams can be described as graphic palindromes.
HistoryĪmbigrams published in The Strand Magazine, june 1908. In March 2011, the Oxford English Dictionary incorporates this new word into its database ,Īnd the Merriam-Webster dictionary updates its own in September 2020. Among them, the expressions "vertical palindromes" by Dmitri Borgmann (1965) and Georges Perec, "designatures" (1979), "inversions" (1980) by Scott Kim, or simply "upside-down words" by John Langdon and Robert Petrick. Prior to Hofstadter's terminology, other names were used to refer to ambigrams. Hofstadter attributed the origin of the word to conversations among a small group of friends during 1983–1984. Sometimes the readings will say identical things, sometimes they will say different things. One can voluntarily jump back and forth between the rival readings usually by shifting one’s physical point of view (moving the design in some way) but sometimes by simply altering one’s perceptual bias towards a design (clicking an internal mental switch, so to speak). Īn ambigram is a visual pun of a special kind: a calligraphic design having two or more (clear) interpretations as written words. Hofstadter describes ambigrams as "calligraphic designs that manage to squeeze in two different readings." "The essence is imbuing a single written form with ambiguity". The word ambigram was coined in 1983 by Douglas Hofstadter, an American scholar of cognitive science, best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach. 6.7.1 Clothing and fashion involving ambigrams.6.4 Ambigrams in philosophy and cognition.6.1.5 Ambigrams in drawings and paintings.
The term was coined by Douglas Hofstadter in 1983. 180° rotational symmetryĪn ambigram is a calligraphic design that has several interpretations as written.