A reverse dictionary is a dictionary alphabetized by the reversal of each entry:
Before computers, reverse dictionaries were tedious to produce. The first computer-produced was Stahl and Scavnicky's A Reverse Dictionary of the Spanish Language, in 1974.[1] The first computer-produced reverse dictionary for a single text was Wisbey, R., Vollständige Verskonkordanz zur Wiener Genesis. Mit einem rückläufigen Wörterbuch zum Formenbestand, Berlin, E. Schmidt, 1967.
In a reverse word dictionary, the entries are alphabetized by the last letter first, then next to last, and so on.[1][2] In them, words with the same suffix appear together. This can be useful for linguists and poets looking for words ending with a particular suffix, or by an epigrapher or forensics specialist examining a damaged text (e.g. a stone inscription, or a burned document) that had only the final portion of a word. Reverse dictionaries of this type have been published for most major alphabetical languages.
Applications of reverse word dictionaries include:
Reverse word dictionaries are straightforward to construct, by simply sorting based on reversed words. This was labor-intensive and tedious before computers, but is now straightforward. By the same token, reverse dictionaries have become less important since online word lists can be searched dynamically.