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.
A word game or word puzzle can be of several different types:
The goal is to form words out of given letters.
Acrophobia
Alpha Blitz
Alternade
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"
Bananagrams
Boggle
Bonza
Chicktionary – Game from Blockdot
Dabble
Euler's Day Off
Ghost
Jumble – game of word forming with letter permutations
Letterpress (video game)
Letters of Gold
Pass the Bomb – make a word including the given letters before the bomb explodes
Perquackey
Pick Two rearranging word tile crossword game
Puzzlage
Quiddler – a game of forming words using a deck of cards with letters printed on them
Ruzzle
Scrabble and its variants
Scribbage
Scriptorium – the game that gives meaning to words
Spellathon
Take a Letter
Upwords
Wordament
Wordiamo
Word Monsters
WordSpot
Word Streak with Friends
Words of Gold
Words with Friends
Paper and pencil games/puzzles
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
Games focusing on the semantics of words.
Charades
Fictionary
LINQ
Mad Libs
Scattergories
Taboo
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
Spelling bee
Wheel of Fortune
Lingo
Des chiffres et des lettres
Countdown
Ambigrams
Fortunately, Unfortunately
Rebuses – picture puzzles representing a word
Verbal arithmetic
