Wordplay

Wordplay is what happens when people treat language as a toy. Some forms are thousands of years old; others were named only recently.

Palindromes

A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards, usually ignoring spaces and punctuation. Single words include level, radar and racecar. The best-known sentence is “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama”.

Anagrams

An anagram rearranges the letters of one word or phrase to make another: listen and silent, dormitory and dirty room. Cryptic crosswords use them constantly, usually signalled by words such as “mixed”, “broken” or “confused” in the clue.

Pangrams

A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” has long been used to test typewriters and fonts. Shorter ones exist, such as “Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow”, which uses 29 letters.

Spoonerisms

Swapping the first sounds of two words, as in “a blushing crow” for “a crushing blow”. They are named after William Archibald Spooner, an Oxford don of the late 19th century who was famous for them, though many of the examples credited to him were probably invented by his students.

Portmanteau words

Blends of two words into one: brunch (breakfast and lunch), smog (smoke and fog), motel (motor and hotel). Lewis Carroll gave the idea its name in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where Humpty Dumpty explains that “slithy” is like a portmanteau, “two meanings packed up into one word”. Carroll also coined chortle, a blend of chuckle and snort.

Mondegreens and eggcorns

mondegreen

A misheard phrase, especially a lyric. The writer Sylvia Wright coined the word in 1954: as a child she heard the ballad line “and laid him on the green” as “and Lady Mondegreen”.

eggcorn

A mistaken word that still makes a kind of sense, such as “egg corn” for acorn or “for all intensive purposes” for for all intents and purposes. The name was proposed by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum in 2003.

Contronyms

Words that can mean their own opposite. To dust can mean to remove dust or to add it (dusting a cake with sugar). To sanction can mean to allow or to penalise. To cleave can mean to split apart or to cling together.

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Next: Usage Notes