What is a play on words example

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)

• 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 spunMy 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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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.

SaxaphoneSaxiphoneSaxophoneSaxyphoneSaxephone

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.

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:

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!