Word play is a literary technique in which the nature of the words used themselves become part of the subject of the work. Puns, phonetic mixups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, and telling character names are common examples of word play.
All writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly adept or committed to word play. Shakespeare was a noted punster. James Joyce--whose Ulysses, and even more so, his Finnegans Wake, are filled with brilliant writing and brilliant word play--is another noted word-player. For example, Joyce's phrase "they were yung and easily freudened" clearly conveys the meaning "young and easily frightened", but it also makes puns on the names of two famous psychoanalysts, Jung and Freud.
Other writers closely identified with word play include:
Games :: Language Arts
Language :: Useless Pages
Acronyms :: Dictionaries

A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia - Includes book of word records, palindromic words, pangrams, most beautiful and ugly words, Scrabble words, and Bible word trivia.
A Flock of Segers - Wordplay combining titles and names of bands and movies.
Answers to Rhetorical Questions - Covers a wide-ranging number of subjects.
Before and After - The object is to fill in the blanks. Example: ____ day ____ becomes Sun day light, that is, Sunday and Daylight
Beggar's Opera and its Sanskrit Wordplay - Offers linguistical evidence that John Gay's classic contains wordplay based on the ancient Hindu language.
Bovilexics.com - Humorous new words and phrases created to define various important and unimportant concepts.
Condit's Linguistical Predicament - Shows how the Latin word, condit, typifies the political woes of Gary Condit in the Chandra Levy matter.
Corsinet.com - Offers collections of word play, insults, riddles and jokes.
Meta Description: [ corsinet.com is an excellent, intelligent way to waste time on the internet: discover unusual facts, learn some new things, wake up your brain cells and have some fun. ]
Dave's Fun Words - Categorized list of words which are fun to say.
Dictionary Of Wordplay - A collection of puns, tomswiftys, jokes, tongue-twisters, double entendres, homonyms, and homophones.
Meta Description: [ Dictionary Of Wordplay is a collection/archive of puns, tomswifters, shaggy-dog stories, doofinisms, jokes, tongue-twisters, double entendres, homonyms, homophones and any other examples of wordplay in the English language. ]
Dislexicon Word Generator - Contains Dislexicon, which generates new made-up words and definitions for them.
Divinest-Sense.com: Tom Swifties - Definition of this style of play on words, a collection of original and previously-known examples, and links to other collections.
Meta Description: [ ’Don’t you know my name?’ asked Tom swiftly. ]
Euler's Day Off - Rearrange a five-by-five grid of letters to form words in crossword fashion. There is a daily puzzle with no registration.
Meta Description: [ Euler's day off ]
Family Travel Games - A book of family-oriented wordplay to occupy time during road trips, from easy to challenging. No additional implements needed.
Meta Description: [ 101 Travel Word Games to Play in the Car for family vacations and road trips. Car word games are perfect for family vacations when traveling with the family. ]
Faulkner or Machine Translation? - A quiz to determine whether literary passages are the Faulkner originals or ones machine-translated from German into English.
Fun With Words - Heteronyms, contronyms, eponyms, word/letter frequencies and other trivia.
Fun-with-words.com - Dedicated to oddities of the English language plus various types of wordplay.
Meta Description: [ Wordplay, Word Puzzles, and Word Games ]
Funny Names Site - Contains names like Justin Credible and Mandy Lifeboats.
Meta Description: [ Funny,silly made up names for emails,signing in,testing databases,baby names if you're feeling cruel but mainly to make you smile. ]
Funnyname.com - A collection of amusing, interesting, strange, and occasionally rude names from the phone book.
Meta Description: [ Thousands of funny, strange, and rude names of real people and businesses from the phone book ]
Gadzillion Things to Think About - 10,000+ rhetorical questions. Accepts submissions.
Meta Description: [ Real life humor questions to encourage the whole family to THINK and be CREATIVE in a FUN way ]
Keepers of Lists - A large archive of amusing lists. Lists can be created, added to and voted on by the public.
Meta Description: [ Our humble order of monks, keeps the net's funniest list of lists ]
Language Fun - Shows how English can be distorted, corrupted or misinterpreted under numerous circumstances.
LazrChet's Rhetorical Questions - Questions designed to open one's mind, even if no answer is expected.
Loquacious Lipograms - Information and links on lipograms, works of fiction that omit a single letter.
Meta Description: [ Lipograms: words that don't contain a symbol: a linguistic oddity for linguistic oddballs ]
Lost in Translation - See what happens when an English phrase is translated by computer back and forth between 5 different languages. Confusion results.
Ms-Sam-Antics - Oxymora, famous last words and Confucius Says are just some of the wordplay included.
Meta Description: [ This site is the collective works of some very creative and talented punsters and Word Masters. It is our hope you'll find enough daffynitions, puns and word play here to keep you entertained for hours. ]
National Public Radio - New York Times and Weekend Edition puzzle editors present a weekly wordplay challenge.
Meta Description: [ Sunday Puzzle ]
Oh my God! There's an axe in my head. - How to say this phrase in various languages.
Opundo - Includes wordplay and oddities, mathematica, theologica, computica, scientifica, and other humour.
Meta Description: [ Clean humour from Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises ]
Piece of Pi MadLibs - Site featuring a collection of madlibs.
SadMan Software: Wordplay - Software for the word-puzzle enthusiast.
404
Science Wordplay - Deals with conversion of measuring units from a scientific angle.
500
Scorpio Tales - Collection of anagrams, pangrams, eponyms, heteronyms, contronyms, homophones and mangled English.
404
Similes Galore - A book of the author's own personally-created similes, catch phrases, and one-liners.
Stink Pink - Questions have answers with two rhyming words.
Meta Description: [ A Free Rhyme Time Game We Called Stink Pink ]
Text Messages - A collection of symbolic smiley messages.
Meta Description: [ A collection of smiley tags ]
The Collective Noun Page - Entertaining and annotated listing of collective nouns such as 'a murder of crows' and 'a pomposity of professors'.
Meta Description: [ The Collective Noun Homepage ]
The Fictionary - Contains new, made-up words which are combinations of other words. Accepts contributions.
Meta Description: [ your source for witty words, humor columnists and funny links ]
The Mother of All Excuses Place - Over 900 excuses to not go to work or school, police and accidents, breaking dates, doctor, missing church, diet, and taxes.
Meta Description: [ A place where you can read or submit excuses for not going to work, school, being stopped by the police, accident, breaking dates, doctor, missing church, and other humor excuses! ]
The Tate Family Members - Plays on words using Tate as a last name.
Meta Description: [ A humorous look at the Tate family members who show up in church ]
The Word Spy - Explains new words and phrases with new entries added regularly, plus archives of previous entries.
Thinking on Words - A whimsical view on some words and expressions.
Unscramble.net - Unscramble, find, rhyme or define various words online.
Meta Description: [ Dictionary, crossword puzzle solver, rhyming dictionary, unscramble words, word finder and jumble puzzle solver. ]
Untruisms and One-Trick Words - Phrases that are only used when they are untrue, and words that can only be used within a cliche'.
Vocab Vitamins - A new word each day, plus the tools to enable you to use it.
Meta Description: [ Simple and thoughtful tools to expand your vocabulary for effective communication in the English language. For writers, readers, those with an urgent need for test preparation (SAT, GRE, and any exam with a verbal component), and everyday people with a penchant for delivering the full range of t... ]
Vocal Names Riddles - Guess a celebrity's name which is actually made of various words.
Meta Description: [ Brain Teaser World: Optical illusions,riddles,puzzles, brain teasers and more ! ]
Wireless Power Word Game - Challenging word jumbles posted every week.
Word Games Software - Created specifically for Scrabble players, a downloadable English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows.
Meta Description: [ word search utility for scrabble players ]
Word Masher - Scrambles your text but leaves the first and last letter of each word intact. The result is readable if you have a good vocabulary.
Meta Description: [ Here it is... Word Masher! The world's first known CGI-based word scrambler to satisfy the mix-up-the-middle-letters-of-each-word craze of 2003. ]
Word Skit - Linguistic contortions, weird and wonderful words, plus quotations.
Word-Jumble.com - Unscramble mixed-up letters dealing with sports, books, music and miscellaneous. Click on the scrambles to find their answers.
Wordage: The Game of Words - Has three levels of difficulty to challenge the average player as well as any lurking wordsmiths.
Wordorium - A repository of newfangled words with mangled or meandering meanings created by wordpeckers.
You Grok - Use the clues to determine the subject of the puzzle. Inspired by Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.”
Meta Description: [ Grokker delivers hundreds of topically organized search results in a single visual map. Grokker is ideal when you want to explore a subject broadly, discover new information, and come to a deeper understanding. ]
| to make a guillotine (like the French Revolution)... Comments are appreciated. ... Guillotine french revolution ... | |
| Next Video | |