The problem#

If you take the word wizard, reverse the order of the letters and reverse the alphabet:

From: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
To:   ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

then you get the word wizard back, an observation made at least as early as 1972.

Now let's write a shell script to verify this so we can find other words with similar interesting properties. The obvious shell script to verify this

echo wizard | tr a-z z-a | rev

unfortunately fails with the error

tr: range-endpoints of 'z-a' are in reverse collating sequence order

The error is by design: it's not clear what a sequence in reverse order should mean, so POSIX actually requires that it not work.