Puns: All in the name of “Good Pun”!
Paronomasia: the most common type of pun. It makes use of words that sound similar to other words, but
which have different meanings.
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I had a very nervous guitar playing friend. He was always fretting about something.
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Q: Why do people become bakers?
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The priest was tending his vegetable garden. He bowed his head, and said: "Lettuce spray."
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There was a ghost at the hotel, so they called for an inn specter.
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They asked why I was moving to France, so I told them I had nothing Toulouse.
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Alarms: what an octopus is.
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I used to work as a banker but lost interest in the work.
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Knock-knock jokes: Example: A. Knock, Knock! B. Who’s there? A. “Orange” B. “Orange” who?
C. Orange you going to let me in? (For more knock-knock jokes, go to www.knock-knock-joke.com)
A: Because they knead the dough!
Tom Swifty: a type of pun named after the Tom Swift American adventure novels. The author Victor
Appleton would always describe every action with an adverb. Tom never just said anything; he said it in
the tradition of pulp fiction: carefully, excitedly, eagerly, etc. A “Tom Swifty” is a particular type of pun
centering on the adverb in the following formula:
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"You should go clean the lawn," Tom said rakishly.
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"I hate being on welfare," Tom said dolefully.
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"Those knives are dangerous," Tom said pointedly.
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"I dropped my toothpaste!" Tom said crestfallenly.
Spoonerisms: also known as "metathesis", are a specific form of wordplay involving the swapping
syllables between two words in a phrase (usually the exchanging first syllable of two words), in such a way
that the meaning of the phrase is completely altered. (Definition taken from www.badpuns.com)
The name comes from one Reverend Spooner, who was a priest and university professor at Oxford,
England, and who lived between 1844 and 1930. He suffered from regular tips of the slung (slips of the
tongue), and rapidly became famous for them.
Examples:
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Two American Football teams are on a tour of Europe and have a quiz to see which team can name
most places in Holland. The game was won by a single Dutch Town.
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A child was misbehaving by protesting loudly and rudely, waving boards with crazy slogans on, while
guests were visiting. He was punished for having mad banners.
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I'm a baker for the army. When I go to war, I go in all buns glazing.
Palindrome: a word, phrase, sentence, or even a passage that is completely reversible - in other words, if
its letters are written in reverse, they spell exactly the same thing (punctuation and spacing does not need
to be included).
Single word examples include "madam" and "radar", but they can be of any length, and there are many
sentence- and even paragraph-length palindromes. The longest I have come across is over three hundred
words long, and yes - it's completely reversible. Some common palindromes are “radar,” “madam,”
“racecar,” and “eye.”
Examples:
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from the novel The God of Small Things: Malayalam (the language of Kerala); Madam I’m Adam
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Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna.
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Do geese see God?
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Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
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2D Palindromes: word squares in which every row and column forms a word in both directions:
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Anagram: A word can be said to be an anagram of another if both words contain exactly the same letters.
Thus "carthorse" is an anagram of "orchestra". More complex anagrams can be made using phrases or
sentences, and by specifying letters that need to be added or removed to solve the puzzle. Anagrams are in
most common use in crossword puzzle clues.
Examples:
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“old west action” is an anagram for Clint Eastwood
“Hip pill” is an anagram for Phillip (to find out the various anagrams of your name, go to
www.wordsmith.org/anagram/)
“Partial men” is an anagram for parliament
A Few cartoons with puns in them:
Pun Websites: Check out many more puns at the following websites…
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www.wordsmith.org
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www.badpuns.com
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www.fun-with-words.com
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www.knock-knock-joke.com