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The claim that the word homework spelled backwards translates to child abuse in Latin has been a feature of the internet since at least March 2013. In January 2021, a Reddit thread brought the assertion renewed interest. The claim is false. The word krowemoh does not exist in the Latin language. In fact, not even the character W existed in Latin, whose alphabet contained 23 characters. Latin, the language of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, had largely died out by the 6th century AD — replaced by regional dialects that would ultimately become the Romance languages of Europe. A form of the character W was first used around the 7th century AD, because the Latin alphabet did not have a character to represent the sound /w/ spoken in Germanic and old English languages. As a solution, writers began using uu (or vv as u and v referred to the same character in the classical Latin alphabet) to represent the sound /w/. The character we now know as W did not see widespread use until the 1500s, well after Latin-speaking humans were creating new words in that language. All of this is to say that krowemoh is not a word and it certainly does not mean child abuse in Latin or any other language we are aware of.
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