Tyler Uebele

Definition

rotonym [ro-tuh-nim] noun

1. a word, that when all letters are rotated by half of the language's alphabet, becomes another word in its language.

Origin: 2007; rot- rot- + -ōnym- -onym

What are 'rotonyms'?

While playing with the weak cipher known as ROT13, I decided to check whether any words would ROT13 into other words.  I wrote a simple script to cipher a dictionary file, then compared it against itself to look for matches.  To my delight, I had found some solid results.  Some of the resultant pairs even relate to each other in other ways.  I decided this effect was worth naming, and coined 'rotonym' to describe them.