Reverse Words
Type or paste text below to flip the order of words — the last word moves to the front, the first to the back, while each word's letters stay intact.
What Is Word Order Reversal?
Reversing word order means taking a sequence of words and rearranging them so the last word appears first and the first word appears last — while each individual word's letters remain unchanged.
| Input | Reversed Words |
|---|---|
hello world |
world hello |
one two three four five |
five four three two one |
Hello, how are you? |
you? are how Hello, |
The quick brown fox |
fox brown quick The |
Note that punctuation attached to a word stays with that word — you? stays you?, not ?you. Multiple spaces between words are collapsed to a single space in the output.
How It Works
- Trim leading and trailing whitespace
- Split on any sequence of whitespace (
/\s+/) to produce an array of words - Reverse the array
- Join back with single spaces
Common Uses
Creative writing and games — Reversing word order is a common wordplay exercise and puzzle mechanic. "Yoda speak" is a famous example of unusual word order.
Sorting and stack operations — In programming, reversing a list of items is a fundamental operation. This tool makes it easy to test or visualize the result without writing code.
Testing text parsers — When building or debugging text processing pipelines, reversed input is a quick way to verify that a parser handles words in any order correctly.
Mnemonic devices — Some people memorize sequences backwards as a recall strategy. Reversing a numbered or ordered list can help with this.
How Is This Different From Reversing a String?
These are commonly confused:
| Operation | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Reverse words (this tool) | Hello World |
World Hello |
| Reverse string | Hello World |
dlroW olleH |
| Reverse each word | Hello World |
olleH dlroW |
Use Reverse String to flip every character. Use Reverse Each Word to mirror the letters within each word while keeping word order the same.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it preserve punctuation?
Yes — punctuation attached to a word is treated as part of that word and moves with it. Standalone punctuation on its own (rare) is treated as a word too.
What happens with multiple spaces or tabs?
Any whitespace sequence between words is treated as a single separator. The output always uses a single space between words regardless of how many spaces were in the input.
Does it work with multi-line text?
Line breaks count as whitespace, so words on different lines will all be merged into a single reversed line. If you want to reverse lines independently, use the Reverse Lines tool instead.
