# List of forms of word play

This is a list of techniques used in word play.
Techniques that involve the phonetic values of words
* Engrish
* Chinglish
* Homonym: words with same sounds and same spellings but with different meanings
* Homograph: words with same spellings but with different meanings
* Homophone: words with same sounds but with different meanings
* Homophonic translation
* Mondegreen: a mishearing (usually unintentional) as a homophone or near-homophone that has as a result acquired a new meaning. The term is often used to refer specifically to mishearings of song lyrics (cf. soramimi).
* Onomatopoeia: a word or a grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing
* Phonetic reversal
* Rhyme: a repetition of identical or similar sounds in two or more different words
** Alliteration: matching consonants sounds at the beginning of words
** Assonance: matching vowel sounds
** Consonance: matching consonant sounds
** Holorime: a rhyme that encompasses an entire line or phrase
* Spoonerism: a switch of two sounds in two different words (cf. sananmuunnos)
* Same-sounding words or phrases, fully or approximately homophonous (sometimes also referred to as "oronyms")
Techniques that involve the letters
* Acronym: abbreviations formed by combining the initial components in a phrase or names
* Anadrome: a word or phrase that reads as a different word or phrase in reverse
* Apronym: an acronym that is also a phrase pertaining to the original meaning
** RAS syndrome: repetition of a word by using it both as a word alone and as a part of the acronym
** Recursive acronym: an acronym that has the acronym itself as one of its components
* Acrostic: a writing in which the first letter, syllable, or word of each line can be put together to spell out another message
** Mesostic: a writing in which a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text
** Word square: a series of letters arranged in the form of a square that can be read both vertically and horizontally
* Backronym: a phrase back-formed by treating a word that is originally not an initialism or acronym as one
** Replacement Backronym: a phrase back-formed from an existing initialism or acronym that is originally an abbreviation with another meaning
* Anagram: rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase
** Ambigram: a word which can be read just as well mirrored or upside down
** Blanagram: rearranging the letters of a word or phrase and substituting one single letter to produce a new word or phrase
** Letter bank: using the letters from a certain word or phrase as many times as wanted to produce a new word or phrase
** Jumble: a kind of word game in which the solution of a puzzle is its anagram
* Chronogram: a phrase or sentence in which some letters can be interpreted as numerals and rearranged to stand for a particular date
* Gramogram: a word or sentence in which the names of the letters or numerals are used to represent the word
* Lipogram: a writing in which certain letter is missing
** Univocalic: a type of poetry that uses only one vowel
* Palindrome: a word or phrase that reads the same in either direction
* Pangram: a sentence which uses every letter of the alphabet at least once
* Tautogram: a phrase or sentence in which every word starts with the same letter
* Caesar shift: moving all the letters in a word or sentence some fixed number of positions down the alphabet
Techniques that involve semantics and the choosing of words
* Anglish: a writing using exclusively words of Germanic origin
* Auto-antonym: a word that contains opposite meanings
* Autogram: a sentence that provide an inventory of its own characters
* Irony
* Malapropism: incorrect usage of a word by substituting a similar-sounding word with different meaning
* Neologism: creating new words
** Phono-semantic matching: camouflaged/pun borrowing in which a foreign word is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word (related to folk etymology)
** Portmanteau: a new word that fuses two words or morphemes
** Retronym: creating a new word to denote an old object or concept whose original name has come to be used for something else
* Oxymoron: a combination of two contradictory terms
* Zeugma and Syllepsis: the use of a single phrase in two ways simultaneously
* Pun: deliberately mixing two similar-sounding words
* Slang: the use of informal words or expressions
Techniques that involve the manipulation of the entire sentence or passage
* Dog Latin
* Language game: a system of manipulating spoken words to render them incomprehensible to the untrained ear
** Pig Latin
** Ubbi dubbi
* Non sequiturs: a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement
Techniques that involve the formation of a name
* Ananym: a name with reversed letters of an existing name
* Aptronym: a name that aptly represents a person or character
* Charactonym: a name which suggests the personality traits of a fictional character
* Eponym: applying a person's name to a place
* Pseudonym: an artificial fictitious name, used as an alternative to one's legal name
* Sobriquet: a popularized nickname
Techniques that involves figure of speech
* Conversion (word formation): a transformation of a word of one word class into another word class
* Dysphemism: intentionally using a word or phrase with a harsher tone over one with a more polite tone
* Euphemism: intentionally using a word or phrase with a more polite tone over one with a harsher tone
* Kenning: circumlocution used in Old Norse and Icelandic poetry
* Paraprosdokian: a sentence whose latter part is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe the first
Others
* Aleatory
* Bushism
* Constrained writing
* Rebus
* Interlanguages, Mixed languages and Macaronic languages
* Sarcasm
* Tmesis