When six-year-old Levi Budd saw the word stop on a sign, he created the word pots. Before long, he was imagining words backwards and coming up with rats from star and pets from step.

The inquisitive word lover had just one question for his mom that day in January, when the two were in the car and he turned stop into pots: "What do we call a word that spells another word backwards?"

His mom and dad, Jessy Friedenberg and Lucky Budd, discovered there's no word defining such flipped words so Levi decided he better invent one: levidrome, which he told his parents explains why spit is tips and spoons are snoops.

Lucky Budd said his son started reading at age three and by four knew that the word palindrome means a word reads the same spelled forward and backward, like racecar.

Budd, a historian and author of nine books, has proposed levidrome, pronounced lev-ih-drome, to dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster.

Merriam-Webster explained to Budd that a word must be in common use before it's accepted though levidrome has already been added to its open-source dictionary of user-submitted words and the online Urban Dictionary.

A YouTube video Budd posted about five weeks ago to explain his son's levidrome fixation has created buzz among students across the country and has also won support from actor and "Star Trek" veteran William Shatner, whose recent tweet had him appealing to the Oxford Dictionary to include Levi's "exciting word."

Actress Patricia Arquette has also tweeted her support, saying: "Such a cool idea."

Budd said he's thrilled that people are talking about words, and that's the most gratifying part of the levidrome experience so far.