Was it a car or a cat I saw is a well-known palindrome sentence that ignores spacing and punctuation.

The longer version

Strip out the spaces and capitals and the letters fall into a mirror: the final saw reverses the opening was, and every letter between has a matching partner. Punctuation and word breaks are decoration, so the sentence works only on the level of raw letters.

That convention is standard in recreational word play. A man, a plan, a canal: Panama is built the same way, and both were constructed deliberately rather than discovered. Palindromic dates and numbers follow the identical rule with digits instead of letters, and the longer the string, the more artificial the wording has to become.

Where this entry sits

This category gathers small surprises about the English language, from odd spelling rules to words that quietly hide their own history. Expect palindromes, punctuation oddities, borrowed terms, and the strange ways writing systems record spoken speech. The full list sits on the Words and Language page, where every entry is listed in order.