We explain what word games are, in which areas they are used, their function and examples of various types.
What is a play on words?
A word game is called different hobbies and recreational activities that involve words, lyrics or the ability to handle the language. They are very common as a form of entertainment, but they also have a pedagogical and educational value, especially during the school stages, as a method of exercising the lexicon, writing and / or spelling.
Some of these games They can be board games, involving pieces and a certain type of material produced, while others are entirely mental or require little paper and pencil, such as word searches. The most traditional of all, however, usually combine the rhyme, the tongue twisters, the paradox and other forms of play with the idiom, and transmitted orally from generation to generation.
Word games are common in humorous settings, such as joke popular or true literature, and due to their strongly idiosyncratic nature, they are often untranslatable. They commonly take advantage of homophony Y homography, to suggest second and third senses, difficult to grasp by non-native speakers of the language.
Examples of word games
Some examples of word games are:
- Tongue twisters, phrases of complex pronunciation that must be said in a row, and that usually tell a humorous or content story figurative. For example: "Three sad tigers swallow wheat in a wheat field."
- The calambures, which are humorous phrases in which the modification of a syllable it alters the meaning of what has been said, usually adding a picaresque double meaning. For example: “Between the white carnation and the red rose, your majesty choose. / Between the white carnation and the red rose, her majesty is lame ”.
- The word searches, which are printed squares that contain scattered letters, and in which the reader must find and mark certain words in a straight line, combining the letters available to do so. They are very common in hobby magazines.
- Crossword puzzles, another famous pastime, consist of filling a printed board with black and white squares, similar to chess but in a specific order, writing in the white squares the answer to a set of keys listed separately.
- Scrabble, a board game that faces two or more players on a checkered board, on which they must build words with the seven letters randomly assigned to them initially, using them strategically to form long, high-scoring words.
- Hangman, a traditional game in which each player takes turns choosing a word, and the other must guess it by suggesting the letters that make it up. For each success, the corresponding letter will be written and it will be easier for you to guess the whole word, but for each mistake a fragment of a stick man (stick doll) will be drawn hanging from a gallows. If the little man is fully drawn, the diviner will lose the game and the roles must be exchanged.