About this tool
A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards — "racecar" and "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" both qualify once you look past spacing, punctuation and letter case. This checker normalizes your text the same way a human would when judging a palindrome by ear, then compares it against its own reverse.
Toggle "Ignore case" and "Ignore spaces & punctuation" off to require an exact, character-for-character match instead — useful when checking short single-word inputs or code identifiers. Everything runs locally in your browser as you type; nothing is uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Why is "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" a palindrome if the letters don't match exactly?
By default this tool ignores letter case, spaces and punctuation before comparing — the same way a person judges a palindrome by ear. Strip those out and "amanaplanacanalpanama" reads identically forwards and backwards. Turn off both toggles to require an exact, character-for-character match instead.
Does this work with non-English text and accented letters?
Yes. The "clean" step uses Unicode-aware letter/number matching, so accented letters (é, ñ, ü) and non-Latin scripts are treated as valid letters rather than being stripped out — only actual punctuation and whitespace get removed when that toggle is on.