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Word games and puzzles are generally engaged as a source of entertainment, but they have been found to serve a very useful and progressive 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.
Most word games and puzzles require, as ingredients of success, swiftness of thought, a well-developed vocabulary, and excellent general language skills, including comprehension and spelling. In turn, these same skills are generally thought to become that much more heightened with continued play.
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, whilst some are unique to English-speakers.
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Language-predicated educational games
A word game or word puzzle can be of several different types:
Letter arrangement games
The goal is to form words out of given letters.
- Acrophobia
- Alpha Blitz
- Anagrab
- 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".
- Boggle
- Chicktionary - Game from Blockdot
- Euler's Day Off
- Ghost
- Imangi -- a game of sliding rows and columns of letters to form words in crossword fashion.
- Jumble -- game of word forming with letter permutations.
- Lettercube -- form words, advance them and conquer your opponents home
- Literati
- Scrabble
- Scribbage
- Scriptorium -- the game which gives meaning to words
- Take A Letter
- Upwords-- Scrabble-like, with the ability to place letters on top of existing letters to a maximum of five tiers.
- Word Sandwich alphabetizing game akin to a word version of The Price is Right's Clock Game
Paper and pencil games/puzzles
- Crossword puzzles
- Cryptic crossword
- Cryptograms
- Hangman
- Jotto (or Giotto)
- Word search
- Acrostics
Structured games
Games focusing on the semantics of words.
Linguistic recreations
Games based around words and letters.
- Anagram as discussed above
- Celebrity Name Game Challenge
- Constrained writing
- Ditloids
- Gry
- Homophone Word Game
- How Many Hippos?
- Kaladont
- Kangaroo words
- Letter banks
- Lipograms
- Palindromes
- Pangrams
- Shiritori
- Spelling bee
- Spoonerisms
- The Da Vinci Game
- The Green Glass Door
- The Man Who Melted Jack Dann
- Word golf
Televised Games
Miscellaneous
- Ambigrams
- Rebuses - picture puzzles representing a word
- Verbal arithmetic
See also
- Double entendre
- Forum games
- Language game for a linguistic variant.
- List of puzzle video games
- Online_Word_games
- Puns
- Puzzles
- Word play for literary works in which the nature of the words used themselves become part of the subject of the work.
- Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics
