A surprising number of flowers are named for people:

• begonia: after Michel Bégon, a former governor of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti)
• camellia: after Jesuit botanist Georg Joseph Kamel
• dahlia: after Anders Dahl, a student of Carl Linnaeus
• forsythia: after Scottish botanist William Forsyth
• fuchsia: after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs
• gardenia: after Scottish naturalist Alexander Garden
• magnolia: after French botanist Pierre Magnol
• poinsettia: after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. minister to Mexico, who is credited with bringing the flower to the United States
• wisteria: after American physician Caspar Wistar
• zinnia: after German botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn

The ackee fruit of Jamaica is named Blighia sapida after William Bligh, who discovered it in his travels after the mutiny on HMS Bounty.

(Via Maxwell W. Nurnberg, Wonders in Words, 1968.)

“Plaindromes” are ordinary sentences that sound as if they ought to be palindromes:

Money-man I, an Adam, not even a doom.
Stella, Otis deified Satan and Edna.
An item? No, revolt took Natasha.
Eggbert, a wry dross needs seating, tea-grams.
Droop: an old fan? Needles fone a poor ode.

“Ungrams” are invalid anagrams:

Richard M. Nixon / Noxious charmer
Brooklyn Bridge / Good ride by lake

Both were invented by Jef Raskin of Cupertino, California (from the August 2010 issue of Word Ways).

Poet Alastair Reid arranged unusual words into “garlands,” rings that end where they began:

What is a Tingle-Airey?

A tingle-airey is a hand organ, usually played on the street by the turning of a handle, and often decorated with mother-of-pearl or piddock shells.

What are Piddocks?

Piddocks are little mollusks which bore holes in rocks and wood, or in the breastsummers of buildings.

What is a Breastsummer?

A breastsummer is a great beam supporting the weight of a wall, and sometimes of a gazebo above.

What is a Gazebo?

A gazebo is a round balcony with large windows looking out on a view, often of ornamental gardens and cotoneasters.

What is a Cotoneaster?

A cotoneaster is a kind of flowering shrub, a favorite of mumruffins.

What is a Mumruffin?

A mumruffin is a long-tailed tit which often visits bird tables in winter for its share of pobbies.

What are Pobbies?

Pobbies are small pieces of bread thrumbled up with milk and fed to birds and baby animals.

What is Thrumbled?

Thrumbled is squashed together. Ants thrumble round a piece of bread, and crowds in streets thrumble round gongoozlers.

What is a Gongoozler?

A gongoozler is an idle person who is always stopping in the street and staring at a curious object like a tingle-airey.

Once you’ve traversed the list twice or thrice, he says, “you will be able to use them whenever you wish.”

Read word by word, this sentence is a palindrome:

Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl.

From a New Statesman competition:

Women understand men; few men understand women.
God knows man. What is doubtful is what man knows God.
Does milk machinery milk does?
Bores are people that say that people are bores.

A few more.

08/22/2026 UPDATE: From Walt Kelly’s comic Pogo:

Smile, wavering wings,
Above rains pour,
While hopefully sings
Love of shorn shore.

Shore shorn of love
Sings hopefully while,
Pour rains above,
Wings wavering, smile.

(“I don’t git it.” “That’s the clever part. It’s gotta be read backward.”)

(Thanks, David.)