WORD PLAY

'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.
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. The well-known spelling of ''fish'' as ''ghoti'' is often (but perhaps incorrectly) attributed to Shaw: "''gh'' as in ''tough'', ''o'' as in ''women'', ''ti'' as in ''station''".

★ Van Dyke Parks

★ Thomas Pynchon

★ Flann O'Brien

★ Jasper Fforde
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

Contents

See also

See also

★ Acrostic

★ Aleatory

★ Alliteration

★ Anagram

★ Ananym

★ Anglish

★ Antagonym

★ Apronym

★ Aptronym

★ Autogram

★ Blanagram

★ Bushism

★ Charactonym

★ Chronogram

★ Constrained writing

★ Contronym

★ Crab canon

★ Diphthong

★ Dog Latin

★ Dysphemism

★ Engrish

★ Eponym

★ Etymology

★ Euphemism

★ Feghoot

★ Figure of speech

★ Haiku

★ Holorime

★ Homograph

★ -izzle

★ Kenning

★ Language game

★ Letter bank

★ Limerick

★ Lipogram

★ Logology

★ Malapropism

★ Metaphor

★ Mondegreen

★ Neologism

★ Nerdcore

★ Nominative determinism

★ Onomatopoeia

★ Opish

★ Oronym

★ Oxymoron

★ Palindrome

★ Pangram

★ Pangrammatic window

★ Paraprosdokian

★ Pig Latin

★ Portmanteau

★ Prosody

★ Pseudonym

★ Pun

★ RAS syndrome

★ Rebus

★ Recursive acronym

★ Reverse-lipogram

★ Retronym

★ Rhyme

★ Semordnilap

★ Simile

★ Slang

★ Sobriquet

★ Spanglish

★ Spoonerism

★ Transcription (linguistics)

★ Ubbi dubbi

★ Univocalic poetry

★ Verbing

★ Wit