Riddles are the oldest known word games, and arguably still the most popular. Games in which words are implied or enacted include riddles, charades, Fictionary and Parker Brothers’ Pictionary Games that use tiles and dice to rearrange words include Parker Brothers’ popular Scrabble and Boggle, Perquackey and Facebook’s Scramble. Games that use paper and pencil include crosswords and the word jumble (sometimes called “word search”), as well as Hangman, a popular word guessing game. Additionally there are various types of “word play” type games like puns, acronyms and double entendres that writers occasionally incorporate into their work as sport for their readers. Word games can be classified into three categories: games in which paper and pen are used to solve the puzzle games in which letter tiles or dice – either real or virtual – are rearranged to find or create words and games in which words are either implied or enacted. Media has helped to promulgate their popularity: the crossword is a fixture of almost all daily newspapers, the word puzzler is a regular feature on many National Public Radio shows, while television has spawned the mega-hit “Wheel of Fortune”, a variation on the classic game of Hangman. Word games are found in almost all written languages and are widely regarded as both entertainment and education. They can be competitive games where one player’s skill is pitted against another’s as in Hangman, Scrabble or charades or they may have a player to solve the puzzle creator’s challenge like in crosswords. Word games are puzzles that rely upon a player’s language ability to solve them.

Jumble jong word games