thanks

Tricky one :-)
Thanks for posting

easy enough, did not like my spelling of pal word, but

Good grid. Thanks.

Ah, one of them only works with American spellings. Now I get it.

lots of good red herrings, though cata being such a specific thing gives that group and a lot of the grid away, if you spot it. It would be considerably trickier to spot the group with something less obviously the start to a word (and very few words at that) like Mono or just the letter B

Political parties would be a better answer for the "day" category

It really needs to take "palindrome" as an answer for "palindromic names"