It’s hard to say when and where exactly this started, but there’s a popular online joke-turned-legend that the word “homework” spelled backwards (so, “krowemoh”) means “child abuse” in Latin. It doesn’t. Someone was probably being funny on social media years ago, and the joke went viral to the point that a lot of people believed it was true.
It’s easy to see how that happened. Homework is tedious, takes up a lot of time, and keeps students from doing things they enjoy in their free time.
These days, you can at least use tools like Math-GPT.com to make your life easier. But this wasn’t the case back in the day, when the entire krowemoh saga started. Students had to spend hours on boring home assignments every day – hence the “child abuse” legend.
But what does homework mean backwards? Hate to disappoint, but absolutely nothing. It’s gibberish that makes no sense in Latin or any other language.
This doesn’t mean you can’t jokingly claim that your teacher is abusing you when they assign you a 3,000-word essay due by the end of the week. It just won’t be correct, at least not technically. Who cares, though?
