I've stumbled on set of small but charming words that I felt just needed to be passed along. I call them "radar words" because I happened to be mulling over the shape of their namesake:
radar
It's a familiar word; practically an everyday word, but what we almost never notice is that it's a palindrome as well: run it backwards and it still spells "radar". Once you see it, you see it — that is, you can see the word as a symmetrical shape, rising from a quiet start to that central "d" and then falling again. An elegant little word, with an elegance in just five letters that slips beneath our notice. Part of its grace comes from it economy. Shorter, and it would be trivial; longer, too artificial. But the five-letter pattern has an almost musical variety to it: a leading consonant that serves as departure and return, a central consonant that's a contrapuntal hinge, and a ruling vowel to connect them. That's the way radar works, too: it's sent out to an object and echoes back to its origin. An elegant word in all ways.
From here it's easy to find more. Change the consonant bookends to get:
madam
That's a famous one, but still handsome to the eye, and beguilingly common for a word with such a gratifying property. Have some more:
refer
rotor
solos
sexes
civic
kayak
Again, very common words whose symmetry doesn't usually catch our attention. In fact, of all the radar words, I can find only one that's rarely used, "minim", and even it's hardly récherché.
Any others, you're wondering? In fact, if you exclude the rather awkward "dewed", I've found exactly 11 radar words, a number that seems somehow preordained. Of the two remaining, one is "tenet". (It joins "kayak" as one of the few words whose outer letters ascend rather than remain level.) The eleventh I leave to the pleasure of your discovery. It's a simple word, not unlike "eleven", and just as attractively symmetric as the other radar words.