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All writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly adept or committed to word play. Shakespeare was a noted punster. James Joyce, whose Ulysses, and even more so, his Finnegans Wake, are filled with brilliant writing and brilliant word play is another noted word-player. For example, Joyce's phrase "they were yung and easily freudened" clearly conveys the meaning "young and easily frightened", but it also makes puns on the names of two famous psychoanalysts, Jung and Freud.

Other writers closely identified with word play include:

• Lewis Carroll in his Alice books
• Vladimir Nabokov
• George Bernard Shaw. The well-known spelling of fish as ghoti comes from Shaw: " gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in station".
• Van Dyke Parks

Plays can enter common usage as neologismIn linguistics, a neologism is a recently- coined word, or the act of inventing a word or phrase. Additionally it can imply the use of old words in a new sense such as giving new meanings to existing words or phrases. Neologisms are especially useful in is.

Word play is closely related to word games, that is, games in which the point is manipulating words. See also language gameA language game is a concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein at the beginning of his book Philosophical Investigations''. A language game is a simple language, combined with a context that shows what to do with the language. One example he gives is a lan for a linguist's variation.

An extreme form of playing with words is creating a fictional languageSome authors use fictional languages as a device to underline differences in culture, by having their characters communicate in a fashion which is both alien and dislocated. Primary examples of this are: George Orwell's Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four Va.

A taxonomy of word play together with record-holding words in each category is available here: Taxonomy of Wordplay

See also:

• anagramAn anagram ( Greek ana "back", and graphein "to write") is the result of permuting the letters of a word or words in such a manner as to produce other words that possess linguistic meaning. The meaning of the new word so created is seen in the context of
• apronymAn apronym is an acronym which means something appropriate to what it stands for. The word comes from a portmanteau of " apropos acronym". An apronym is a lot like a backronym; indeed, a backronym could be described as an ex post facto apronym. While back aka "aptronym"
• chronogramA chronogram is a sentence or inscription in which the capital letters, interpreted in Roman numerals, stand for a particular date if rearranged. The word, meaning "time writing" derives from the Greek words chronos ("time") and gramma ("letter"). Longer
• constrained writingConstrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. Constraints are very common in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form. The most co
• crab canon
• figure of speech
• holorime
• kenning
• lipogram
• mondegreen
• oxymoron
• pangram
• palindrome
• portmanteau
• pun
• rebus
• transcription (linguistics)
• verbing