Hello and welcome to The English Like a Native Podcast, the listening resource for intermediate to advanced-level English learners. My name is Anna and today's episode delves into word games. Alright, now before I start, I'd like you to listen out for the following words. Are you ready? Doomscroll. Aficionado. Whip out. Fiendish. Devious. Ramp up. And biased. Okay, did you make a note of those? So those words will appear within this episode. Now, if you are a Podcast Plus Member, then you will get access to a bonus episode that will explore some of the words and phrases used within this episode, as well as all the additional benefits that come with being a Plus Member. So, you may consider joining my club to get access to a greater wealth of resource that will support your English learning, but I'll put more details about the club and being a Plus Member down in the comments. But for now, let's get started. Listen to this interaction and tell me if you can guess what is going on."OK, it's a seven-letter word, so guess a letter.""Uh, Eh.""Eh? As in E or A?""Eh, for elephant.""There's no E, so I'm going to draw the base.""A then.""Yes, there are two. The second letter and the sixth letter.""Um, S?""Sorry, no S. Here's the stand." So what am I doing? Playing a game, yes, but does this word game sound familiar to you? One person chooses a word and marks the corresponding number of blank letters on a board or a piece of paper. The other players have to guess letter by letter, but if you get it wrong, then the person who chooses the word draws a part of a picture featuring an apparatus and a person. One line for each wrong guess. Perhaps you know a version of this game where you live. It's been around for ages and is still popular with teachers and pupils today. In Catalonia they play Crocodile. Every time the letter guesser gets it wrong, a crocodile climbs up another step on a staircase towards a figure trapped at the top. In Turkey, they play Train Crash. A train advances in slow motion and the guesser has to reveal the word before it hits a wall. What about in Britain and America then? Let's return to our players. They are nearly at the end."Last chance. I've drawn the gallows, the head, the body, the arms and one leg.""So, the word is blank A N blank M A N.""Uh, oh, give me a clue.""Okay, it's the name of a game, a word game.""Oh, I give up. W?""No, sorry, I win. Now I'll draw in the last leg and hang your man. That's the name of the game, this game.""Oh, H A N G M A N spells Hangman. Now it's my turn.". Don't worry, we're not going to play Hangman for the whole podcast. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. But what about other word games? Which ones do you remember or even still play today? There are, of course, quite a few well-known ones that come out at Christmas or on rainy days in the form of board games. Scrabble and Boggle are two well-known examples. And there's also Upwords, in which you can stack your letter tiles on top of others that are already on the board. What these have in common is that your aim when playing is to create words in order to score points. But there are plenty of other types of word game, and you don't have to be still at school or fed up because of the weather to play them. These days the first thing you do in the morning might be to whip out your mobile and play the new edition of Wordle. Or try to get to the next level of Wordscapes. On the bus or on the train to work, not everyone is doomscrolling. There are still crossword aficionados, too, who sit over breakfast or a pint in the pub and try to solve cryptic or more straightforward clues in order to fit the words into spaces provided. Some of these cryptic clues are so fiendish that they are more like riddles or conundrums. And they have been with us right from the time of the ancient civilisations. Let me give you an example. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? This is The Riddle of the Sphinx from Greek mythology. In order to enter the city guarded by the Sphinx, you would have had to solve this riddle. If you didn't, then the Sphinx would kill you instantly. You might have heard this riddle before, but if you haven't, what do you think the answer could be? You'll have to keep listening to the end. For the ancients, riddles also served educational and philosophical purposes. They encouraged critical thinking and creativity while providing amusement. They often took the form of enigmatic questions or descriptions that required lateral thinking to solve. It's not exactly the same thing, but I'm reminded of a practical problem that the filmmaker David Lynch had while directing the Twin Peaks film. He was convinced that he needed a soft wall for one particular scene, but couldn't think how to achieve this satisfactorily. Perhaps, while sleeping or meditating, the answer came to him. A curtain! The idea of a curtain opened up a great many cinematic possibilities for how to proceed with setting the scene and creating the atmosphere that he wanted. You find wordplay in other forms too. A popular technique in poetry is to use acrostics, where the initial letters of each line spell out a word or phrase. For example,"Home. H. Hugs and warmth where we belong. O. Open hearts where love is strong. M. Memories shared laughter in the air. E. Every moment is beyond compare." Word games and quizzes have been popular on TV for many years. Some of them have been based on the Hangman format of guessing letters based on a clue, whereas others involve trying to make the longest word possible out of a selection of letters. Contestants might be asked to solve anagrams too. A word or phrase that when you rearrange the letters form another word or phrase. So, if I give you the word'thicken' and tell you that this is an anagram of a room in a house, I hope you will quickly be able to see the answer is kitchen'. Humorous anagrams play on the names of famous people. Which hugely controversial figure, born in Queens, New York, could I be referring to if I used the anagram, Dr. Pant Mould? Speaking of television word games, I simply have to mention a wonderful word game from my childhood called Call my Bluff. Two teams of three people competed against each other. Each player gave a definition of a word selected by the presenter, but only one of the definitions was true. The other two were bluffs. You might know the word from the card game, poker, where a player tries to make it appear that he or she has some cards that they don't really have. They try to convince the other players that something is true when it isn't. And that's exactly what the contestants did on this show called Call my Bluff. I tell you what. Let's play a quick game now. The definitions on the show were usually backed up by convoluted explanations, but we'll keep it simple for now. Your word is morepork. Okay. Here are three definitions. Which one do you think is true? Morepork. Number one, a processed food which promises a higher meat content than average. Number two, morepork, a type of owl found only in New Zealand and a small part of Australia. Number three, morepork, a language spoken in Myanmar and Thailand. Which one do you think is true? If you're a keen ornithologist and you know a thing or two about our feathered friends, then you will have gone for option two. The morepork is a type of owl. So, that was a taster of the game Mr Bluff, or Call my Bluff. There is a commercially available board game which is quite similar to this called Balderdash, which itself is a slightly old-fashioned word meaning nonsense. In my experience, word games are great if you're on a journey with the family. To pass the time, you can play I Spy. You look around you and choose something that everyone can see. Then you say,"I spy with my little eye something beginning with T. So what could it be?""Hmm, trees? Tyres? Towers? T-shirt?" If you're really clever, or really devious, you could make your turn last a very long time. Another game that could be good for a long session is saying a word that starts with the last letter of the previous word. So, if you start with'octopus', for example, then the next person has to say a word that starts with S. You could make it more challenging by limiting the game to words from certain categories. So, if a player started with'octopus' because the category was sea creatures, what would you say next that starts with S?"Hmm, how about'squid' or'seahorse'?" For language learners, a game that I would most highly recommend is any form of the game Taboo. You have to describe a secret word to a teammate but to ramp up the difficulty, you also have a list of three to five other words that you cannot use. That are taboo or forbidden. Try to describe Christmas, for example, without using the words Santa, presents, December, holiday and turkey. It is a wonderful game to use in a language class, especially if you compete against the clock. You can quickly write or print list of 10 to 20 words and have a lot of fun. You can buy the board game version too, although once you run out of words, you'll have to create your own anyway. Maybe as a language teacher and content creator, I'm a bit biased, but I think you'll agree that there is an enormous amount of fun to be had using and playing with words. So, have you solved The Riddle of the Sphinx? What walks on four legs in the morning? Two legs at noon and three legs in the evening. The original answer, I believe, is man. You might be asking yourself,"How so?" Well, as babies in the morning of our lives, we crawl on our hands and knees. The next stage is the afternoon when we stand and walk upright. Finally, in the evening, according to the logic of the Sphinx, we need a cane or walking stick to help us move, thus providing the third leg. So, did you find this riddle fiendish or friendly? Now, I want you to share with me your favourite word game or even share a riddle. But if you do share a riddle, please also provide the answer so that I'm not completely scratching my head for a very long time. You can do this on the YouTube version of this podcast episode over on The English Like a Native Podcast YouTube page, or if you're listening via a streaming platform like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, then just click on the fan mail option, you have an option to send a message and you can get in touch that way. I look forward to hearing all about your word games or trying to solve your riddles. As always, thank you so much for listening. Take very good care and goodbye.