An ambigram is a calligraphic composition of glyphs (letters, numbers, symbols, or other shapes)

An ambigram is a calligraphic composition of glyphs (letters, numbers, symbols, or other shapes) that can yield different meanings depending on the orientation of observation. Most ambigrams are visual palindromes that rely on some kind of symmetry, and they can often be interpreted as visual puns with multiple layers of meaning. The term was coined by Douglas Hofstadter between 1983 and 1984.

In everyday life, the most common ambigrams are visually symmetrical words. When flipped, they either remain unchanged or mutate to reveal a different meaning. "Half-turn" ambigrams undergo a point reflection (180-degree rotational symmetry) and can be read upside down (for example, the word "swims"), while mirror ambigrams have axial symmetry and can be read through a reflective surface like a mirror. Of course, many other types of ambigrams exist.

Ambigrams can be constructed in various languages and alphabets, and the concept often extends to numbers and other symbols. Drawing symmetrical words has also become a recreational activity for amateurs, and in recent years, ambigram tattoos have become increasingly popular. In the design field, many people also draw inspiration from ambigrams for their creative work.

Etymology

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. It is a neologism composed of the Latin prefix ambi- ("both") and the Greek suffix -gram ("drawing, writing").

Hofstadter describes ambigrams as "calligraphic designs that manage to squeeze in two different readings." "The essence is imbuing a single written form with ambiguity".

An ambigram is a visual pun of a special kind: a calligraphic design having two or more (clear) interpretations as written words. 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). Sometimes the readings will say identical things, sometimes they will say different things.[11][4]

— Douglas Hofstadter

Hofstadter attributes the origin of the word ambigram to conversations among a small group of friends in 1983.

Prior to Hofstadter's terminology, other names were used to refer to ambigrams. 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.

Ambigram was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2011, and to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in September 2020.Scrabble included the word in its database in November 2022.

History

Many ambigrams can be described as graphic palindromes.

The first Sator square palindrome was found in the ruins of Pompeii, meaning it was created before the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. A sator square using the mirror writing for the representation of the letters S and N was carved in a stone wall in Oppède (France) between the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages,thus producing a work made up of 25 letters and 8 different characters, 3 naturally symmetrical (A, T, O), 3 others decipherable from left to right (R, P, E), and 2 others from right to left (S, N). This engraving is therefore readable in four directions.

Although the term is recent, the existence of mirror ambigrams has been attested since at least the first millennium. They are generally palindromes stylized to be visually symmetrical.

In ancient Greek, the phrase "ΝΙΨΟΝ ΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΗ ΜΟΝΑΝ ΟΨΙΝ" (wash the sins, not only the face), is a palindrome found in several locations, including the site of the church Hagia Sophia in Turkey. It is sometimes turned into a mirror ambigram when written in capital letters with the removal of spaces, and the stylization of the letter Ν (Ν).

A boustrophedon is a type of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern European languages, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in boustrophedon must be read in opposite directions. Also, the individual characters are reversed, or mirrored. This two-way writing system reveals that modern ambigrams can have quite ancient origins, with an intuitive component in some minds.

Mirror writing in Islamic calligraphy flourished during the early modern period, but its origins may stretch as far back as pre-Islamic mirror-image rock inscriptions in the Hejaz.

The earliest known non-natural rotational ambigram dates to 1893 by artist Peter Newell. Although better known for his children's books and illustrations for Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll, he published two books of reversible illustrations, in which the picture turns into a different image entirely when flipped upside down. The last page in his book Topsys & Turvys contains the phrase The end, which, when inverted, reads Puzzle. In Topsys & Turvys Number 2 (1902), Newell ended with a variation on the ambigram in which The end changes into Puzzle 2.

In March 1904 the Dutch-American comic artist Gustave Verbeek used ambigrams in three consecutive strips of The UpsideDowns of old man Muffaroo and little lady Lovekins. His comics were ambiguous images, made in such a way that one could read the six-panel comic, flip the book and keep reading.

From June to September 1908, the British monthly The Strand Magazine published a series of ambigrams by different people in its "Curiosities" column. Of particular interest is the fact that all four of the people submitting ambigrams believed them to be a rare property of particular words. Mitchell T. Lavin, whose "chump" was published in June, wrote, "I think it is in the only word in the English language which has this peculiarity," while Clarence Williams wrote, about his "Bet" ambigram, "Possibly B is the only letter of the alphabet that will produce such an interesting anomaly."