Word Net
wordplay n : a humorous play on words; "I do it for the pun of it"; "his constant punning irritated her" [syn: pun, punning, paronomasia]Moby Thesaurus
abuse of terms, acrostic, amphibologism, amphiboly, anagram, calembour, corruption, equivocality, equivoque, jeu de mots, logogram, logogriph, malapropism, metagram, missaying, palindrome, paronomasia, play on words, pun, punning, spoonerismWord play is a literary
and narrative technique in which the nature of the words used
themselves become part of the subject of the work. Puns, phonetic mix-ups
such as spoonerisms,
obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly
formed sentences, and telling character names are common examples
of word play.
Word play is quite common in oral
cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning.
Interestingly enough, strictly visual orthographic word play is much
less predominant than sound-based word play in alphabetically
written literatures. This may be due to the fundamental orality of written communication
in those literatures, as compared with word play in ideographically written
literatures such as the Chinese.
Most writers engage in word play to some extent,
but certain writers are particularly adept or committed to word
play. Shakespeare's
"quibbles" have made him a noted punster. P.G.
Wodehouse was also hailed as a "comic genius recognized in his
lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce" for his ingenious
wordplay. James Joyce,
author of Ulysses
and Finnegans
Wake, 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:
- Lewis Carroll in his Alice books
- Willard R. Espy, who collected several anthologies of word play
- Vladimir Nabokov
- George Bernard Shaw
- G. K. Chesterton
- Van Dyke Parks
- Thomas Pynchon
- Flann O'Brien
- Jasper Fforde
- Jack Kerouac (in On the Road and more so in Visions of Cody)
- Isaac Brock is known for his clever word play in Modest Mouse lyrics.
- The Apocryphal book of Susanna has elements of word play in its original Greek.
Plays can enter common usage as neologisms.
Word play is closely related to word games,
that is, games in which the point is manipulating words. See also
language
game for a linguist's variation. The Hungarian term for
wordplay, occasionally used in the circle for its diaeres is
Szójáték.
A taxonomy of word play together with
record-holding words in each category is available here: Taxonomy of
Wordplay
wordplay in German: Wortspiel
wordplay in French: Jeu de mots
wordplay in Japanese: 言葉遊び
wordplay in Polish: Paragram
wordplay in Swedish: Paragram
wordplay in Vietnamese: Lộng
ngữ