Q. Do you know the etymology of the word sneaker (the tennis shoe)? Is the reference to that of a soft-soled shoe which permits sneaking around?

A. The earliest recorded use of sneaker referring to a shoe comes from 1895. Sneaker was originally used in the U.S., but a related term, sneak, appeared in Britain a few decades earlier. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following from "Female Life in Prison" (1862) as the first recorded usage:

"The night-officer is generally accustomed to wear a species of India-rubber shoes or goloshes on her feet. These are termed `sneaks´ by the women [of Brixton Prison]."

Given that, there probably is a good connection between sneaker and the idea of sneaking around (or at least moving about quietly).

Q. I am looking for a term to describe when a word means something forward and something else when reversed. For example not/ton, top/pot, desserts/stressed.

A. Some wordsmiths call such a term or phrase a semordnilap, which is palindromes spelled backwards. (Of course, if one were to reverse the singular, palindrome, one would have emordnilap, but semordnilap is the preferred term.)

If you search for semordnilap online you'll find quite a few Web pages discussing that word phenomenon and giving examples.

Q. I would have sworn that I had heard wowser used in the sense of something big, grand, outstanding; something with a lot of wow; but I don't find that sense in the dictionary.

A. We've looked through our files and found a few examples of the wowser you were thinking of:

"A wowser of an action film, it also poses profound, basic philosophical questions and explores such posers as 'How can a good God let terrible things happen to good people?' and 'Can an act of evil be right when it is performed in the service of the greater good?'" (Gary Arnold, Washington Times, January 6, 2000)

"Tuck goat cheese, some fresh herbs, and a prawn into a zucchini bloom, fry it until the shrimp is pink, and you've got a wowser of an appetizer." (Jaimee Rose, Arizona Republic, August 11, 1999)

The first record that we have of this wowser comes from a 1948 piece by Bennett Cerf in the Saturday Review. It looks like Cerf misapplied the older "puritanical person" sense of wowser, which H.L. Mencken had been promoting. We've considered adding the newer sense to several dictionaries, but for various reasons, it has never made the cut. We will have to revisit it for future editions.

Incidentally, wowser can also be used as an interjection, and as one of the editors looked through the citations, she realized where she had heard the word before — in the cartoon (and later film) Inspector Gadget. "Wowser" or "wowsers" is the title character's signature exclamation. Maybe all those hours spent watching the show as child had some value after all.