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
 * 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