List of forms of word play information

This is a list of techniques used in word play.

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (August 2008)

Techniques that involve the phonetic values of words

• Engrish
• Chinglish
• Homonym: words with same sounds and same spellings but with different meanings
• Homograph: words with same spellings but with different meanings
• Homophone: words with same sounds but with different meanings
• Homophonic translation
• Mondegreen: a mishearing (usually unintentional) as a homophone or near-homophone that has as a result acquired a new meaning. The term is often used to refer specifically to mishearings of song lyrics (cf. soramimi).
• Onomatopoeia: a word or a grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing
• Phonetic reversal
• Rhyme: a repetition of identical or similar sounds in two or more different words
  • Alliteration: matching consonants sounds at the beginning of words
  • Assonance: matching vowel sounds
  • Consonance: matching consonant sounds
  • Holorime: a rhyme that encompasses an entire line or phrase
• Spoonerism: a switch of two sounds in two different words (cf. sananmuunnos)
• Same-sounding words or phrases, fully or approximately homophonous (sometimes also referred to as "oronyms")

Techniques that involve the letters

• Acronym: abbreviations formed by combining the initial components in a phrase or names
• Apronym: an acronym that is also a phrase pertaining to the original meaning
  • RAS syndrome: repetition of a word by using it both as a word alone and as a part of the acronym
  • Recursive acronym: an acronym that has the acronym itself as one of its components
• Acrostic: a writing in which the first letter, syllable, or word of each line can be put together to spell out another message
  • Mesostic: a writing in which a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text
  • Word square: a series of letters arranged in the form of a square that can be read both vertically and horizontally
• Backronym: a phrase back-formed by treating a word that is originally not an initialism or acronym as one
  • Replacement Backronym: a phrase back-formed from an existing initialism or acronym that is originally an abbreviation with another meaning
• Anagram: rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase
  • Ambigram: a word which can be read just as well mirrored or upside down
  • Blanagram: rearranging the letters of a word or phrase and substituting one single letter to produce a new word or phrase
  • Letter bank: using the letters from a certain word or phrase as many times as wanted to produce a new word or phrase
  • Jumble: a kind of word game in which the solution of a puzzle is its anagram
• Chronogram: a phrase or sentence in which some letters can be interpreted as numerals and rearranged to stand for a particular date
• Gramogram: a word or sentence in which the names of the letters or numerals are used to represent the word
• Lipogram: a writing in which certain letter is missing
  • Univocalic: a type of poetry that uses only one vowel
• Palindrome: a word or phrase that reads the same in either direction
• Pangram: a sentence which uses every letter of the alphabet at least once
• Tautogram: a phrase or sentence in which every word starts with the same letter
• Caesar shift: moving all the letters in a word or sentence some fixed number of positions down the alphabet

Techniques that involve semantics and the choosing of words

• Anglish: a writing using exclusively words of Germanic origin
• Auto-antonym: a word that contains opposite meanings
• Autogram: a sentence that provide an inventory of its own characters
• Irony
• Malapropism: incorrect usage of a word by substituting a similar-sounding word with different meaning
• Neologism: creating new words
  • Phono-semantic matching: camouflaged/pun borrowing in which a foreign word is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word (related to folk etymology)
  • Portmanteau: a new word that fuses two words or morphemes
  • Retronym: creating a new word to denote an old object or concept whose original name has come to be used for something else
• Oxymoron: a combination of two contradictory terms
• Zeugma and Syllepsis: the use of a single phrase in two ways simultaneously
• Pun: deliberately mixing two similar-sounding words
• Slang: the use of informal words or expressions

Techniques that involve the manipulation of the entire sentence or passage

• Dog Latin
• Language game: a system of manipulating spoken words to render them incomprehensible to the untrained ear
  • Pig Latin
  • Ubbi dubbi
• Non sequiturs: a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement

Techniques that involve the formation of a name

• Ananym: a name with reversed letters of an existing name
• Aptronym: a name that aptly represents a person or character
• Charactonym: a name which suggests the personality traits of a fictional character
• Eponym: applying a person's name to a place
• Pseudonym: an artificial fictitious name, used as an alternative to one's legal name
• Sobriquet: a popularized nickname

Techniques that involves figure of speech

• Conversion (word formation): a transformation of a word of one word class into another word class
• Dysphemism: intentionally using a word or phrase with a harsher tone over one with a more polite tone
• Euphemism: intentionally using a word or phrase with a more polite tone over one with a harsher tone
• Kenning: circumlocution used in Old Norse and Icelandic poetry
• Paraprosdokian: a sentence whose latter part is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe the first

Others

• Aleatory
• Bushism
• Constrained writing
• Rebus
• Interlanguages, Mixed languages and Macaronic languages
• Sarcasm
• Tmesis