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Recently, a number of TikTok users have turned to the platform to claim that the word "Krowemoh," which is Latin for "child abuse," is homework spelled backwards.
The claim has been making the rounds on the internet since March 2013. A now-deleted Reddit thread resurfaced the claims in January 2021. Furthermore, In February 2021, a screenshot taken by Spicy Memer was published on Instagram by Chillstonks Memes. It had a picture from a Google search asking "what is homework backwards."
The first result was:
"So, basically, 'homework' spelled backwards is 'krowemoh' which in Latin, translates to 'child abuse.'"
However, contrary to this popular claim, "krowemoh" does not translate to "child abuse" in Latin. "Krowemoh" isn't an actual word, either in Latin or any other language.
"Krowemoh" is just "homework" spelled backwards. The compound word "homework" explains itself. It refers to the work that children are expected to complete outside of school, if not at home.
Contrary to the viral TikTok claims, Homework spelled backwards does not mean child abuse
An Instagram account shared a screenshot of a Google search result asking the meaning of homework spelled backwards in February 2021. It started after the viral TikTok claim was made. However, the most prominent result was that "krowemoh," which means "child abuse" in Latin.
Additionally, users will see a warning when they access the Instagram post. The image is blurry in the back, but the social media site has labeled the post as "false information." In fact, contrary to the popular TikTok claim, "krowemoh" wouldn't even exist as a word in Latin, as several users had stated. Reurters stated in a March 8, 2021 article that some claim that "Oh" isn't even a Latin suffix. Some users even joked about how the actual child abuse is the schoolwork itself.
Moreover, the same has been asserted by other social media users. Nochillrick, an Instagram user, shared the identical image and has already gotten 11K likes. Similar claims have been made by other users of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. However, the majority of these posts have already been removed.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the term "Krowemoh" does not actually exist and the claim is false. There were no pertinent results for "krowemoh" when searching Logeion, an open-database created at the University of Chicago that aggregates several Latin and Greek dictionaries.
Furthermore, a Snopes article from January 31, 2021 reported that the Latin language does not even contain the word "krowemoh." The character "W" did not exist in Latin, whose alphabet included 23 characters.
It further stated that the 26-letter alphabet was not created until the Middle Ages, when the letter "v," which had previously been a component of the Latin alphabet, was divided into the letters "u," "v," and "w," and the letter "j" was added.
Furthermore, the same Snopes article claimed that the character "w" did not become widely used until the 1500s, long after people who spoke Latin were inventing new words for that language. It went on to say that "krowemoh" is not a term in Latin or any other language that they are aware of, and it most definitely does not indicate "child abuse."
On the other hand, Reuters reported that some X users provided an additional alleged meaning for "krowemoh" when they searched for the term "Latin." The same source reported that the user also purportedly defined the terms "geometry," "school," and "private account" for words in the English language that were tweeted backward.
Reuters also disclosed that a screenshot of the article for "krowemoh" on the crowdsourcing website Urban Dictionary was also provided by the same X user. However, the MIT Technology Review stated in a 2018 article that because the website lacks style rules, editors, or moderators, its information can be "vague and inaccurate" and contain viewpoints.
The viral claim of TikTok has now been debunked.
