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, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, and telling character names are common examples of word play.

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All writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly adept or committed to word play. Shakespeare was a noted punster. James Joyce, whose Ulysses, and even more so, his Finnegans Wake, are filled with brilliant writing and brilliant word play 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.

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Other writers closely identified with word play include:

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• 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 comes from Shaw: " gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in station".
• Van Dyke Parks

Plays can enter common usage as neologisms.

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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.

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An extreme form of playing with words is creating a fictional language.

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A taxonomy of word play together with record-holding words in each category is

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available here: Taxonomy of Wordplay

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Word play: See also ►



 

Literary technique: Works of fiction use certain techniques to tell a story. This is called literary technique or literary device. It is related to the concept of literary genre. For example, one of the first modern novels, Pamela by Samuel Richardson, used the epistolary technique, which gave birth to the epistolary ...

Pun: A pun (also known as paronomasia) is a figure of speech which consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. A pun can rely on the assumed equivalency of multiple similar words (homonymy), of different shades of meaning of one word ...

Rhetoric: Rhetoric (from Greek ?????, rh?t?r, "orator") is one of the three original liberal arts or trivium (the other members are dialectic and grammar) in Western culture. In ancient and medieval times, both rhetoric and dialectic were understood to aim at being persuasive. The concept of rhetoric has shi...




Word play related Images and Photos (experimental)

Scrabble Word Play Poker Card Game	Bert & Ernie's Word Play (DVD)	Play	Play Dead
Play Ball	Cold Play: X&Y	Cold Play: X&Y	Cold Play: X&Y
Play Hard II	Koi Play	Word Savvy II	Play Money Set