Word game

Word games (also called word game puzzles) are spoken or board games often designed to test ability with language or to explore its properties.

Word games are generally engaged as a source of entertainment, but have been found to serve an educational purpose as well. For instance, young children can find enjoyment playing modestly competitive games such as Hangman, while naturally developing important language skills like spelling. Solving crossword puzzles, which requires familiarity with a larger vocabulary, is a pastime that mature adults have long credited with keeping their minds sharp.

There are popular televised word games with valuable monetary prizes for the winning contestants. Many word games enjoy international popularity across a multitude of languages, while some are unique to English-speakers.

Language-predicated educational games

A word game or word puzzle can be of several different types:

Letter arrangement games

Typdom, a word game from the 1930s

King's Square word game

The goal is to form words out of given letters.

• Anagrams - both a simple game of rearranging letters and a linguistic recreation of making anagrams that seem to illuminate something about the original word, such as "Old west action" for "Clint Eastwood"
• Bananagrams
• Boggle
• Perquackey
• Quiddler - a game of forming words using a deck of cards with letters printed on them
• Scrabble and its variants
• Scribbage
• Upwords
• Words with Friends

Paper and pencil games/puzzles

Rebus example (Earth, Nurse) Answer: Athens

Metagram example (Well, Ball, Walk) Answer: Wall

• Arrowords
• Acrostics
• Crossword puzzles
• Cryptic crossword
• Cryptograms
• Hangman
• Jotto (or Giotto)
• Rebus
• Wonderword
• Word Force
• Word polygon - A puzzle often included in newspapers combining an anagram with a type of wordsearch
• Word search

Structured games

Games focusing on the semantics of words.

• Charades
• Fictionary
• LINQ
• Mad Libs
• Scattergories
• Taboo

Linguistic recreations

These are games based on words and letters.

• Anagram as discussed above
• Constrained writing
• Ditloids
• Gry
• Homophone Word Game
• Kangaroo words
• Letter banks
• Lipograms
• Logogriphs
• Palindromes
• Pangrams
• Rebus
• Shiritori
• Spelling bee
• Spoonerisms
• The Man Who Melted Jack Dann
• Word chain (also called The Name Game or Celebrity Name Game Challenge)
• Word ladder

Televised games

• Spelling bee
• Wheel of Fortune
• Lingo
• Des chiffres et des lettres
• Countdown