Look it up: Victoria B.C., boy's word being considered by Oxford Dictionaries

Attention logophiles! Oxford Dictionaries says it could add the created word of a six-year-old boy from Victoria B.C., to its lexicon.

In an online video, Rebecca Jaganaru, an assistant editor with Oxford, said it's taken notice of the word, "levidrome."

"Lots of people know your word and they know what it means, which means 'levidrome' is well onto its way into our dictionary," she said. "After five weeks, that's really impressive."

In October, Levi Budd and his father, Robert Lucky Budd, who is a contributor to CBC Radio, produced a short video about the genesis of their word, 'levidrome.'

It describes words such as dog, god, pool, loop — words that when spelled backward make new words.

The word came out of Levi's interest in palindromes — words, like racecar, that can be spelled the same forwards or backwards.

However, in the video, Robert Budd says that one day, when his son was five, he saw a stop sign and noticed that stop spells pots backward.

The pair discovered this was not a palindrome.

'Emordnilap?'

"Sometimes, people use the word emordnilap, which is palindrome backwards," said Robert Budd in the video. "But this makes no sense at all."

The pair came up with "levidrome," after Levi, and learned that to get it into a dictionary, they had to make it popular.

Jaganaru says Oxford is impressed with the media coverage and attention online the word has garnered so far.

On Nov. 8, actor William Shatner posted about the word on his Twitter feed, which has more than 2.5 million followers.

"We only add the words that get used by a lot of people for a long time," said Jaganaru.

She says Oxford will now look to see people using "levidrome" not just as part of the Budd's campaign but whenever they are talking about a word that becomes another word when read backwards.

"If, in a year or so, lots of people are still using your word, it might well get into our dictionary," she said.

With files from Deborah Goble.