X

Enjoy Palindrome Week, because there won't be another until 2021

Say it backward: 9-10-19, and the next 9 days are all neatly reversible.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
Two-headed turtle.

Model truth: turtledom.

Don Farrall/Getty Images

Feel like your life is going backward? Maybe that's because it's Palindrome Week, meaning that each day's date, if delivered in American numerical format, can be read the same forward and backward.

The number-fun actually lasts more than just one week. Tuesday is 9-10-19, which backward is... 9-10-19. That formula continues with 9-11-19, 9-12-19, 9-13-19, 9-14-19, 9-15-19, 9-16-19, 9-17-19, 9-18-19 and finally, 9-19-19.

The pattern doesn't hold if you write your dates with the day first, as the Brits and Aussies do, but they'll have to make their own palindromes. "Tacocat" works, or "A Santa Lived As a Devil At NASA," if you want to get creative about it.

There's been a Palindrome Week every year since 2011, but enjoy this one while you can. As Time and Date notes, "every century has nine years with 10 Palindrome Days in a row. These years are always in the second decade of the century." The next time this neat number game appears is in 2021.

Originally published Sept. 10, 9:43 a.m. PT
Correction, 4:57 p.m.: The original version of this story misstated when the next Palindrome Week will be. It'll involve 12-1-21 and the days after that.