Words with the word play in them

It goes without saying that writers are drawn to language, but because we love words so much, the English language is filled with word play. By interrogating the complexities of language—homophones, homographs, words with multiple meanings, sentence structures, etc.—writers can explore new possibilities in their work through a play on words.

It’s easiest to employ word play in poetry, given how many linguistic possibilities there are in poetry that are harder to achieve in prose. Nonetheless, the devices listed in this article apply to writers of all genres, styles, and forms of writing.

After examining different word play examples—such as portmanteaus, malapropisms, and oxymorons—we’ll look at opportunities for how these devices can propel your writing. But first, let’s establish what we mean when we’re talking about a play on words.

Wordplay Definition

Word play, also written as wordplay, word-play, or a play on words, is when a writer experiments with the sound, meaning, and/or construction of words to produce new and interesting meanings. In other words, the writer is twisting language to say something unexpected, with the intent of entertaining or provoking the reader.

Wordplay definition: Experimentation with the sounds, definitions, and/or constructions of words to produce new and interesting meanings.

It should come as no surprise that many word play examples were written by Shakespeare. One such example comes from Hamlet. Some time after Polonius is killed, Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, asks him where Polonius is. The below exchange occurs:

The line “Not where he eats, but where he is eaten” is a play on words, drawing the audience’s attention to Polonius’ death. He is not eating, but being consumed by the worms. This play on the meaning of “eat” utilizes the verb’s multiple definitions—to consume versus to decompose. (It is also an example of synchysis, and of polyptoton, a type of repetition device.)

The most common of word play examples is the pun. A pun directly plays with the sounds and meanings of words to create new and surprising sentences. For example, “The incredulous cat said you’ve got to be kitten me right meow!” puns on the words “kidding” (kitten) and “now” (meow).

To learn more about puns, check out our article on Pun Examples in Literature. Some of the play on words examples in this article can also count as puns, but because we’ve covered puns in a previous blog, this article covers different and surprising possibilities for twisting and torturing language.

Examples of a Play on Words: 10 Literary Devices

Word play isn’t just a way to have fun with language, it’s also a means of creating new and surprising meanings. By experimenting with the possibilities of sound and meaning, writers can create new ideas that traditional language fails to encompass.

Let’s see word play in action. The following examples of a play on words all come from published works of literature.

1. Word Play Examples: Anthimeria

Anthimeria is a type of word play in which a word is employed using a different part of speech than what is typically associated with that word. (For reference, the parts of speech are: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, articles, interjections, conjunctions, and prepositions.)

Most commonly, a writer using anthimeria will make a verb a noun (nominalization), or make a noun a verb (verbification). It would be much harder to employ this device using other parts of speech: using an adjective as a pronoun, for example, would be difficult to read, even for the reader familiar with anthimeria.

Here are some word play examples using anthimeria:

Nouns to Verbs

The word “peace” is being used as a verb, meaning “to calm down.” Many anthimeria examples come to us from Shakespare, in part because of his genius with language, and in part because he needed to use certain words that would preserve the meter of his verse.

Of course, “unhair” isn’t a word at all. But, it’s using “hair” as a verb, and then using the opposite of that verb, to express scalping someone’s hair off.

Shakespeare is using “scarf” as a verb, meaning “to wrap around.” Nowadays, the use of “scarf” as a verb is recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary, but at the time, this was a very new usage of the word.

Verbs to Nouns

It’s difficult to find examples of nominalization in literature, mostly because it’s not a wise decision in terms of writing style. Verbs are the strongest parts of speech: they provide the action of your sentences, and can also provide necessary description and characterization in far fewer words than nouns and adjectives can. Using a verb as a noun only hampers the power of that verb.

Nonetheless, we use verbs as nouns all the time in everyday conversation. If you “hashtag” something on social media, you’re using the noun hashtag as a verb. Or, if you “need a good drink,” you’re noun-ing the verb “drink.” Often, nouns become acceptable dictionary entries for verbs because of the repeated use of nominalizations in everyday speech.

Nouns and Verbs to Adjectives

The words “gossipest, poachest, jailest” might seem silly or immature. But, they’re fun and striking uses of language, and they help characterize Mrs. Day through dialogue.

“I’ll get you, my pretty.”

—From The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

By using the adjective “pretty” as a noun, the witch’s use of anthimeria in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz strikes a chilling note: it’s both pejorative and suggests that the witch could own Dorothy’s beauty.

Anthimeria isn’t just a form of language play, it’s also a means of forging neologisms, which eventually enter the English lexicon. Many words began as anthimerias. For example, the word “typing” used to be a new word, as people didn’t “employ type” until the invention of typing devices, like typewriters. The word “ceiling” comes from an antiquated word “ceil,” meaning sky: “ceiling” means to cover over something, and that verb eventually became the noun we use today.

2. Word Play Examples: Double Entendre

A double entendre is a form of word play in which a word or phrase is used ambiguously, meaning the reader can interpret it in multiple ways. A double entendre usually has a literal meaning and a figurative meaning, with both meanings interacting with each other in some surprising or unusual way.

In everyday speech, the double entendre is often employed sexually. Indeed, writers often use the device lasciviously, and bawdry bards like Shakespeare won’t hesitate when it comes to dirty jokes.

Nonetheless, here a few examples of double entendre that are a little more PG:

The repeated use of “institution” suggests a double meaning. While marriage is, literally, an institution, West is also suggesting that marriage is an institution in a different sense—like a prison or a psychiatric hospital, one that she’s not ready to commit to.

In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero, Odysseus, tells the cyclops Polyphemus that his name is “no man.” Then, when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, the cyclops is enraged and tells people that “no man” did this, suggesting that his blindness is an affliction from the gods. In this instance, Polyphemus means one thing but communicates another, causing humorous ambiguity for the audience.

In Oscar Wilde’s play, the protagonist Jack Worthing leads a double life: to his lover in the countryside, he’s Jack, while he’s Ernest to his lover in the city. The play follows this character’s deceptions, as well as his realization of the necessity of being true to himself. Thus, in this final line of the play, Jack realizes the importance of being “earnest,” a pun and double entendre on “Ernest.”

3. Word Play Examples: Kenning

The kenning is a type of metaphor that was popular among medieval poets. It is a phrase, usually two nouns, that describes something figuratively, often using words only somewhat related to the object being described.

If you’ve read Beowulf, you’ve seen the kenning in action—and you know that, in translation, some kennings are easier understood than others. For example, the ocean is often described as the “whale path,” which makes sense. But a dragon is described as a “mound keeper,” and if you don’t know that dragons in literature tend to hoard piles of gold, it might be harder to understand this kenning.

A kenning is constructed with a “base word” and a “determinant.” The base word has a metaphoric relationship with the object being described, and the determinant modifies the base word. So, in the kenning “whale path,” the “path” is the base word, as it’s a metaphor for the sea. “Whale” acts as a determinant, cluing the reader towards the water.

The kenning is a play on words because it uses marginally related nouns to describe things in new and exciting language. Here are a few examples:

Kenning In Beowulf

At some point in the text of Beowulf, the following kennings occur:

• Battle shirt — armor
• Battle sweat — blood
• Earth hall — burial mound
• Helmet bearer  — warrior
• Raven harvest — corpse
• Ring giver — king
• Sail road  — the sea
• Sea cloth — sail
• Sky candle — the sun
• Sword sleep — death

Don’t be too surprised by all of the references to fighting and death. Most of Beowulf is a series of battles, and given that the story developed across centuries of Old English, much of the epic poem explores God, glory, and victory.

Kenning Elsewhere in Literature

The majority of kennings come from Old English poetry, though some contemporary poets also employ the device in their work. Here are a few more kenning word play examples.

“The Wanderer” is a poem anonymously written and preserved in a codex called The Exeter Book, a manuscript from the late 900s. It contains approximately ⅙ of the Old English poetry we know about today. In this poem, an “earth-stepper” is a person, and a “wealth-chamber” is the wanderer’s mind or heart—wherever it is that he stores his immaterial virtues.

Ian Crockatt is a contemporary poet and translator from Scotland, and his work with Old Norse poetry certainly influences his own poems. “Sea wolf” is a kenning for “sailor,” and a “love cry” is a love poem.

In this Frost sonnet, the speaker employs the kenning “petal-fall” to describe the autumn. The full text of the poem has been included, not for any particular reason, other than it’s simply a lovely, striking poem.

4. Word Play Examples: Malapropism

A malapropism is a device primarily used in dialogue. It is employed when the correct word in a sentence is replaced with a similar-sounding word or phrase that has an entirely different meaning.

For example, the word “assimilation” sounds a lot like the phrase “a simulation.” Employing a malapropism, I might have a character say “Everything is programmed. We all live in assimilation.”

For the most part, malapropisms are humorous examples of a play on words. They often make fun of people who use pretentious language to sound intelligent. But, in everyday speech, we probably employ more malapropisms than we think, so this device also emulates real speech.

The name “malapropism” comes from the play The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In it, the character Mrs. Malaprop often uses words with opposite meanings but similar sounds to the word she intends. Here’s an example from the play:

“He is the very pineapple of politeness!” (Instead of pinnacle.)

Malapropisms are also known as Dogberryisms (from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing), or as acyrologia. Though this word play device is employed humorously, it also demonstrates the complex relationship our brain has with language, and how easy it is to mix words up phonetically.

5. Word Play Examples: Metalepsis

Metalepsis is the use of a figure of speech in a new or surprising context, creating multiple layers of meaning. In other words, the writer takes a figure of speech and employs it metaphorically, using that figure of speech to reference something that is otherwise unspoken.

This is a tricky literary device to define, so let’s look at an example right away:

The expected phrase here would be “the blood from spilling.” But, in this excerpt, “life” replaces the word “blood.” The word life, then, becomes a metonymy for “blood,” and as this displacement occurs in the common phrase “spilled blood,” “life” becomes a metalepsis.

So, there are two layers of meaning going on here. One is the meaning derived from the phrase “spilled blood,” and the other comes from the use of “life” to represent “blood.” In any metalepsis, there are multiple layers of meaning occurring, as a metaphor or metonymy is employed to modify a figurative phrase, adding complexity to the phrase itself.

This is a tricky, advanced example of word play, and it primarily occurs in poetry. Here are a few other examples in literature:

Here, the face in question is that of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world (according to The Iliad and the Odyssey). Helen is claimed by Paris, a prince of Troy, and when he takes Helen home with him, it incites the Trojan war—thus the references to a thousand ships and the towers of Ilium. So, the face refers to Helen, and Faustus describes the beauty of that face tangentially, referencing the magnitude of the Trojan War.

In this Biblical passage, the phrase “cleanness of teeth” is actually referencing hunger. By having nothing to eat, the people have nothing to stain their teeth with. Thus, the figurative image of clean teeth becomes a metalepsis for starvation.

This is a complex extended metaphor and metalepsis. Instead of saying “to the ends of time,” Shakespeare modifies this phrase to “the last syllable of recorded time.” He then extends this idea by saying that life is “a walking shadow, a poor player”—in other words, that which speaks the syllables of recorded time, and then never speaks again. By describing life as an idiot which signifies nothing, Macbeth is saying that life has no inherent value or meaning, and that all men are fools who exist at the whim of a random universe.

Note: this soliloquy arrives after the death of Macbeth’s wife, and it clues us towards Macbeth’s growing madness. So, yes, it’s a very dark passage, but dark for a reason.

To summarize: a metalepsis is a type of word play in which the writer describes something using a tangentially related image or figure of speech. It is, put most succinctly, a metonymy of a metonymy. There is also a narratological device called metalepsis, but it has nothing to do with this particular literary device.

6. Word Play Examples: Oxymoron

An oxymoron is a self-contradictory phrase. It is usually just two words long, with each word’s definition contrasting the other one’s, despite the apparent meaning of the words themselves. It is a play on words because opposing meanings are juxtaposed to form a new, seemingly-impossible idea.

A common example of this is the phrase “virtual reality.” Well, if it’s virtual, then it isn’t reality, just a simulation of a new reality. Nonetheless, we employ those words together all the time, and in fact, the juxtaposition of these incompatible terms creates a new, interesting meaning.

Oxymorons occur all the time in everyday speech. “Same difference,” “Only option,” “live recording,” and even the genre “magical realism.” In any of these examples, a new meaning forms from the placement of these incongruous words.

Here are a few examples from literature:

Note: an oxymoron is not self-negating, but self-contradictory. The use of opposing words should mean that each word cancels the other out, but in a good oxymoron, a new meaning is produced amidst the contradictions. So, you can’t just put two opposing words together: writing “the healthy sick man,” for example, doesn’t mean anything, unless maybe it’s placed into a very specific context. An oxymoron should produce new meaning on its own.

7. Word Play Examples: Palindrome

The palindrome is a word play device not often employed in literature, but it is language at its most entertaining, and can provide interesting challenges to the daring poet or storyteller.

A palindrome is a word or phrase that is spelled the exact same forwards and backwards (excluding spaces). The word “racecar,” for example, is spelled the same in both directions. So is the phrase “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” So is the sentence “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.”

The longer a palindrome gets, the less likely it is to make sense. Take, for example, the poem “Dammit I’m Mad” by Demetri Martin. It’s a perfect palindrome, but, although there are some striking examples of language (for example, “A hymn I plug, deified as a sign in ruby ash”), much of the word choice is nonsensical.

Because of this, there are also palindromes that occur at the line-level. Meaning, the words cannot be read forwards and backwards, but the lines of a poem are the same forwards and backwards. The poem “Doppelganger” by James A. Lindon is an example.

Want to challenge yourself? Write a palindrome that tells a cohesive story. You’ll be playing with both the spellings of words and with the meanings that arise from unconventional word choice. Good luck!

8. Word Play Examples: Paraprosdokian

A paraprosdokian is a play on words where the writer diverts from the expected ending of a sentence. In other words, the writer starts a sentence with a predictable ending, but then supplies a new, unexpected ending that complicates the original meanings of the words and surprises the reader.

Here’s an example sentence: “Is there anything that mankind can’t accomplish? We’ve been to the moon, eradicated polio, and made grapes that taste like cotton candy.” This last clause is a paraprosdokian: the reader expects the list to contain great, life-altering achievements, but ending the list with something a bit more trivial, like cotton candy grapes, is a humorous and unexpected twist.

With the paraprosdokian, writers contort the expected endings of sentences to create surprising juxtapositions, playing with both words and sentence structures. Here are a few literary examples, with the paraprosdokian in bold:

9. Word Play Examples: Portmanteau

A portmanteau is a word which combines two distinct words in both sound and meaning. “Smog,” for example, is a portmanteau of both “smoke” and “fog,” because both the sounds of the words are combined as well as the definition of each word.

The portmanteau has become a popular marketing tactic in recent years. A portmanteau is also, often, an example of a neologism—a coined word for which new language is necessary to describe new things.

Here are a few portmanteaus that have recently entered the English lexicon:

• Fanzine (fan + magazine)
• Telethon (telephone + marathon)
• Camcorder (camera + recorder)
• Blog (web + log)
• Vlog (video + blog)
• Staycation (stay + vacation)
• Bromance (brother + romance)
• Webinar (web + seminar)
• Hangry (hungry + angry)
• Cosplay (costume + play)

Lewis Carroll popularized the portmanteau, but a work of fiction that’s rife with this word play is Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. The novel—which is notoriously difficult to read due to its use of foreign words, as well as its disregard for conventional spelling and syntax—has coined portmanteaus like “ethiquetical” (ethical + etiquette), “laysense” (layman + sense), and “fadograph” (fading + photograph).

10. Word Play Examples: Spoonerism

A spoonerism occurs when the initial sounds of two neighboring words are swapped. For instance, the phrase “blushing crow” is a spoonerism of “crushing blow.”

Often, spoonerisms are slips of the tongue. We might confuse our syllables when we speak, which is a natural result of our brains’ relationships to language.

Spoonerisms can be literary examples of a play on words. But they’re also just ways to have fun with language. An example is Shel Silverstein’s posthumous collection of children’s poems Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook.

How to Use a Play on Words in Your Writing

Writers can utilize word play for two different strategies: literary effect, and creative thinking.

When it comes to literary effect, a play on words can surprise, delight, provoke, and entertain the reader. Devices like oxymoron, metalepsis, and kenning offer new, innovative possibilities in language, and a strong example of these devices can move the reader in a way that ordinary language cannot.

Word play can also stimulate your own creativity. If you experiment with language using literary devices, you might stumble upon the following:

• A title for your work.
• Character names.
• Witty dialogue.
• Interesting or provocative description.
• The core idea of a poem or short story.

I’ll give a personal example. Once, in a fiction course, I was struggling to come up with an idea for a short story. A friend and I ended up bouncing words around and came up with the phrase “psychic psychiatrist” (an example of alliteration and polyptoton). Just playing with words like this was enough to inspire me to write a story about exactly that, a psychiatrist who predicts the future for their clients without realizing it.

Titles like The Importance of Being Earnest (a self-referential pun), “Dammit I’m Mad” (palindrome), or Back to the Future (oxymoron) all use word play to frame and guide the story or poem. You might find inspiration for your own work by considering, with careful attention and an appreciation for language, the many possibilities of a play on words.

Experiment with Word Play at Writers.com

The instructors at Writers.com are masters of word play. Not only do we love words, we love to mess with them in surprising and innovative ways. If you want to formulate new ideas for your work, take a look at our upcoming online writing classes, where you’ll receive expert instruction on all the work you write and submit.

Definition of Word Play

Word play is a literary device, used as a form of wit. In this device, words are used in such a way that they become the main subject of conversation for entertainment and amusement. There are different types of wordplays. It is also called play upon words or play-on-words. Different dictionaries define word play as the exploitation of wit through changing places, contexts, and uses of a word in a way that creates laughter. Word play is also used as a compound word as well as a hyphen such as word-play is hyphenated and wordplay is a compound word. In both cases, it is correct. For example, Merriam-Webster defines this word as “the witty exploitation of meanings and ambiguities of words, especially in puns.” It also states that the word is used as a noun in the sense of cutting jokes.

Types of Word Play

Some of the best word plays include;

1. Pun
2. Alliteration
3. Ambigrams
4. Palindrome
5. Spoonerism
6. Oxymoron
7. Anagrams
8. Pangrams
9. Tongue twisters

Examples of Word Play in Literature

Example #1

Summer Moonshine by P. G. Wodehouse

“A certain critic — for such men, I regret to say, do exist — made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.’ He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

Although Wodehouse has not used puns, his use of Wodehouse characters, the same names, and specifically, out-generalled show his wit. All these words have been placed at the most suitable places and in the most suitable contexts to cause laughter among his readers. They show how Wodehouse plays with words to amuse his readers.

Example #2

Julius Caesar from William Shakespeare

It would become me better than to close
In terms of friendship with thine enemies.
Pardon me, Julius! Here wast thou bayed, brave hart;
Here didst thou fall; and here thy hunters stand,
Signed in thy spoil, and crimsoned in thy Lethe.
O world, thou wast the forest to this hart,
And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee!
How like a deer, strucken by many princes,
Dost thou here lie!

Master of word play, Shakespeare has beautifully used the words hart, forest, and deer to show that Antony is playing upon words. He has two objects; first to save himself from the enemies of Caesar so that he could exact revenge later, and second to show the people how the rebels have killed Caesar. Readers can easily spot the use of heart and heart in the last three lines full of irony and sarcasm only because of this wordplay.

Example #3

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Give me leave. Here lies the water; good: here
stands the man; good; if the man go to this water,
and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he
goes,–mark you that; but if the water come to him
and drown him, he drowns not himself: argal, he
that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.

Although Hamlet is full of puns, these lines uttered by the First Clown show that Shakespeare is at his best when it comes to word play. If you read carefully, you find that the clown has used will, nill, good, water, drown, life, and death in a way that they all seem to contain some metaphysical quibblings and questions that are very hard to answer. In a way, they are also amusing that such a person could use words in such a way that they create serious concern as well as laughter.

Example #4

Rhyme PUNishment from Adventures Word Play by Brian P. Clearly

“Jamaica Sandwich?” Grandma asked,
and I replied, “I ate
some Chile from a China bowl
and Turkey from a plate.

Although these four verses by Brian Clearly show the use of different words in a different way, they also show a very interesting truth about different countries how they are named after things and things are named after them. He has used Jamaica, Chile, China, and Turkey for sandwiches, chili, and turkey for foods commonly known and used in the United States as well as across the globe. This is a beautiful wordplay. In fact, this entire book of Brian Clearly comprises different word plays.

Functions of Word Play

Based on different types, a word-play plays different functions. The first function is to create a sort of joke or fun for the readers so that they should enjoy reading such as Wodehouse has shown, using a portmanteau, out-generalled. The second purpose is to create ambiguity to make people feel that the person is different from what he is speaking. Shakespeare has done the same thing in his play, Julius Caesar. The third is to present some universal truths or metaphysical dilemmas to the public to think deeply such as stated by the clown of Hamlet. The fourth is to make children and people have deeper meanings than are universally accepted in some other way. Brian Clearly has done this in his poetry.

Word play is verbal wit: the manipulation of language (in particular, the sounds and meanings of words) with the intent to amuse. Also known as logology and verbal play.

Most young children take great pleasure in word play, which T. Grainger and K. Goouch characterize as a «subversive activity . . . through which children experience the emotional charge and power of their own words to overturn the status quo and to explore boundaries («Young Children and Playful Language» in Teaching Young Children, 1999)

Examples and Observations of Word Play

• Antanaclasis
  «Your argument is sound, nothing but sound.» — playing on the dual meaning of «sound» as a noun signifying something audible and as an adjective meaning «logical» or «well-reasoned.»
  (Benjamin Franklin)
• Double Entendre
  «I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.» — playing on «drift» being a verb of motion as well as a noun denoting a snowbank.
  (Mae West)
• Malaphor
  «Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I’m green behind the ears.» — mixing two metaphors: «wet behind the ears» and «green,» both of which signify inexperience.
  (Senator Barack Obama, Oct. 2008)
• Malapropism
  «Why not? Play captains against each other, create a little dysentery in the ranks.» — using «dysentery» instead of the similar-sounding «dissent» to comic effect.
  (Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos)
• Paronomasia and Puns
  «Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.» — riffing on the similarity of «quoted» to «quartered» as in «drawn and quartered.»
  (Fred Allen)
• «Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.»
  (credited to Tom Waits)
• «Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.»
  (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)
• «I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
  My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
  But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
  Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
  And having done that, Thou hast done;
  I fear no more.»
  (John Donne, «A Hymn to God the Father»)
• Sniglet
  pupkus, the moist residue left on a window after a dog presses its nose to it. — a made-up word that sounds like «pup kiss,» since no actual word for this exists.
• Syllepsis
  «When I address Fred I never have to raise either my voice or my hopes.» — a figure of speech in which a single word is applied to two others in two different senses (here, raising one’s voice and raising one’s hopes).
  (E.B. White, «Dog Training»)
• Tongue Twisters
  «Chester chooses chestnuts, cheddar cheese with chewy chives. He chews them and he chooses them. He chooses them and he chews them. . . . those chestnuts, cheddar cheese and chives in cheery, charming chunks.» — repetition of the «ch» sound.
  (Singing in the Rain, 1952)

Language Use as a Form of Play

«Jokes and witty remarks (including puns and figurative language) are obvious instances of word-play in which most of us routinely engage. But it is also possible to regard a large part of all language use as a form of play. Much of the time speech and writing are not primarily concerned with the instrumental conveying of information at all, but with the social interplay embodied in the activity itself. In fact, in a narrowly instrumental, purely informational sense most language use is no use at all. Moreover, we are all regularly exposed to a barrage of more or less overtly playful language, often accompanied by no less playful images and music. Hence the perennial attraction (and distraction) of everything from advertising and pop songs to newspapers, panel games, quizzes, comedy shows, crosswords, Scrabble and graffiti.»
(Rob Pope, The English Studies Book: An Introduction to Language, Literature and Culture, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2002)

Word Play in the Classroom

«We believe the evidence base supports using word play in the classroom. Our belief relates to these four research-grounded statements about word play:

— Word play is motivating and an important component of the word-rich classroom.
— Word play calls on students to reflect metacognitively on words, word parts, and context.
— Word play requires students to be active learners and capitalizes on possibilities for the social construction of meaning.
— Word play develops domains of word meaning and relatedness as it engages students in practice and rehearsal of words.»

(Camille L. Z. Blachowicz and Peter Fisher, «Keeping the ‘Fun’ in Fundamental: Encouraging Word Awareness and Incidental Word Learning in the Classroom Through Word Play.» Vocabulary Instruction: Research to Practice, ed. by James F. Baumann and Edward J. Kameenui. Guilford, 2004)

Shakespeare’s Word Play

«Wordplay was a game the Elizabethans played seriously. Shakespeare’s first audience would have found a noble climax in the conclusion of Mark Antony’s lament over Caesar:

O World! thou wast the Forrest to this Hart
And this indeed, O World, the Hart of thee,

just as they would have relished the earnest pun of Hamlet’s reproach to Gertrude:

Could you on this faire Mountaine leave to feed,
And batten on this Moore?

To Elizabethan ways of thinking, there was plenty of authority for these eloquent devices. It was to be found in Scripture (Tu es Petrus . . .) and in the whole line of rhetoricians, from Aristotle and Quintilian, through the neo-classical textbooks that Shakespeare read perforce at school, to the English writers such as Puttenham whom he read later for his own advantage as a poet.»
(M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay. Routledge, 1968)

Found Word-Play

«A few years ago I was sitting at a battered desk in my room in the funky old wing of the Pioneer Inn, Lahaina, Maui, when I discovered the following rhapsody scratched with ballpoint pen into the soft wooden bottom of the desk drawer.

Saxaphone
Saxiphone
Saxophone
Saxyphone
Saxephone
Saxafone

Obviously, some unknown traveler—drunk, stoned, or simply Spell-Check deprived—had been penning a postcard or letter when he or she ran headlong into Dr. Sax’s marvelous instrument. I have no idea how the problem was resolved, but the confused attempt struck me as a little poem, an ode to the challenges of our written language.»
(Tom Robbins, «Send Us a Souvenir From the Road.» Wild Ducks Flying Backward, Bantam, 2005)

Alternate Spellings: wordplay, word-play

Words are powerful, and a masterful use of words can change the world. At the same time, words have a fun side to them too. While the English language often seems to exist purely to confuse us, English also has a silly side that can make us laugh and smile. Are you skeptical? Well, we have dug deep into the English toy box to find a bunch of different ways we can play with words. Fair warning: those that have a low tolerance for dad jokes will want to leave immediately.

Puns

By definition, a pun is a humorous use of a word with multiple meanings or a funny use of a word as a substitute for a similar sounding word. The related terms punning, play on words, and paronomasia are often used to refer to the act of making puns. The term double entendre refers to a type of wordplay that also uses words with multiple meanings, albeit usually in a more risqué manner than a whimsical pun.

Examples of puns

Puns that involve words with multiple meanings:

• The young monkeys went to the jungle gym for some exercise.
• The investor in the bakery demanded a larger piece of the pie.
• The art competition ended in a draw.
• The maestro turned away from the orchestra as they told him the bad news; he couldn’t face the music.

Puns that involve similar sounding words:

• She claimed the big cat was a tiger, but we knew she was lion.
• When he asked me what the flowers should smell like, I told him to use common scents.
• As it turned out, the runners themselves had rigged the race. It was an inside jog.
• The negotiations over the birds went poorly; neither side would give a finch.

Tom Swifty

A Tom Swifty is a fun use of words that follows a quote, usually said by a fictional Tom, using a punny adverb. The term Tom Swifty was coined by writer Willard Espy and named after the Tom Swift series of books, which tended to use a lot of adverbs to describe dialogue.

Examples of Tom Swifties 

• “I have frostbite,” Tom said coldly.
• “I’m stocked on all the essentials,” Jess said needlessly.
• “We feel really bad about what we did,” the children said shamefully.

Stinky Pinky

Stinky pinky, also known as stinky pinkie and by many other names, is a word game in which players try to guess a rhyming phrase based on a definition. The phrase “stinky pinky” itself is a possible answer when playing the game. It is unknown who invented the game or named it, but word games with the name “stinky pinky” can be traced back to at least the 1940s.

Stinky Pinky examples

• Clue: “Stone timepiece”   Answer: Rock clock.
• Clue: “Road pork”   Answer: Street meat.
• Clue: “A young cat’s gloves”   Answer: Kitten’s mittens.

Spoonerisms

A spoonerism is a, usually accidental, swapping of initial sounds of two words. The term spoonerism is named for Oxford lecturer William Archibald Spooner, a notoriously nervous speaker who often swapped the beginnings of words when he spoke publicly.

Spoonerism examples

• It is tinner dime. (“dinner time”)
• He used to work on a bail soat. (“sail boat”)
• Happy dogs love to tag their wails. (“wag their tails”)

Kennings 

A kenning is a metaphorical or poetic phrase that is conventionally used in place of another term.

Kenning examples

• gumshoe = a detective
• pencil pusher = an office worker
• tree-hugger = an environmentalist

Pig Latin

Pig Latin is a form of language, usually used by children, in which the first consonant or consonant sound is placed at the end of a word followed by the sound ā (written as “ay”).

Example: Ancay ouyay eakspay igpay atinlay? (“Can you speak pig Latin?”)

Palindromes

A palindrome is a word, phrase, or sentence that reads the same if read forward or backward.

Palindrome examples

Single words:

• madam
• eve
• noon

Multiple words:

• dog god
• ward draw
• live evil

Sentences:

• A man, a plan, a canal. Panama!
• Madam, I’m Adam!
• Was it a cat I saw?

Anagrams

An anagram is a word, phrase, or sentence formed by rearranging the letters of another.

Anagram examples

• porter is an anagram of report
• attics is an anagram of static
• pub toss is an anagram of bus stop

Antigrams

An antigram is an anagram that means the opposite of the original word or phrase it was formed from.

Examples 

• on the sly is an antigram of honestly
• arise late is an antigram of earliest
• over fifty is an antigram of forty-five

Pangrams

A pangram is a phrase or sentence that includes every letter of the alphabet. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is a famous example of a pangram. Some other fun examples of things that rely on alphabet-based challenges include lipograms, heterograms, tautograms, autograms, and kangaroo words.

Ambigrams

An ambigram is a word or visual design that reads the same or creates a new word or image when flipped upside down or reversed. For example, the word dollop is an example of an ambigram because it would still theoretically read as “dollop” even when turned upside down.

Acrostics

An acrostic is a set of lines or verses where certain letters spell out a hidden message.

Example: 

Curious
Agile
Territorial
Smart

Backronyms

A backronym is an existing word turned into an acronym by creating an appropriate phrase that it could serve as an acronym for.

Examples

• Ghost is a backronym of “ghoul haunting our spooky town.”
• Car is a backronym of “carrying all riders.”
• Alligator is a backronym of “a large lizard is grinning at the other reptiles.”

Do you know the difference between an alligator and a crocodile?

Rhyming, alliteration, assonance, and consonance 

These four words all have to do with using words that have similar sounds. Most people are familiar with rhyming, which typically refers to using words with similar-sounding endings as in The big pig ate a fig. The word alliteration means to use words with similar-sounding beginnings or words that start with the same letter. Assonance means to use similar-sounding vowels anywhere in words when rhyming, whereas consonance means to use similar-sounding consonant sounds anywhere in words when making a rhyme.

Alliteration examples

• She sells seashells by the sea shore.
• Big bunnies bounded behind busy birds.
• Ten tenants took twenty tents to Thailand.

Assonance examples

• We see these bees.
• Leave the cleaver for the skeevy beaver.
• Doodle the Cool Poodle wants oodles of noodle strudel.

Consonance examples

• Look! The crook took cook books!
• Ross, toss the sauce to our boss Joss.
• We heard the third nerdy bird’s words.

Ready to play? take the quiz

Now that you know a multitude of ways to have fun with English, keep these terms in your back pocket with our handy word list. You can take advantage of flashcards, spelling quizzes, and more. Then, put on your party hat and have some fun with our quiz on all these types of word play!