Word.ws English Dictionary

language game

language game noun: a set of rules governing how participants respond to utterings.

Noun

language game (plural language games)

  1. A set of rules governing how participants respond to utterings.
  2. A game that is based on players’ knowledge of a language or languages, such as fictionary, hangman. etc.
  3. A method of manipulating words so that the layman would find it hard to understand, such as pig Latin, gibberish, etc.
    Synonyms:
    ludling

Synonyms of language game

Forms of language game

plurallanguage games

Origin of language game

Calque of German Sprachspiel, coined by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Questions about language game

What does language game mean?
Language game means a set of rules governing how participants respond to utterings.
What part of speech is language game?
Language game is a noun.
What is the plural of language game?
The plural of language game is language games.

Words near language game in the dictionary

  1. language exchanges
  2. language extinction
  3. language extinctions
  4. language families
  5. language family
  6. language game
  7. language games
  8. language island
  9. language islands
  10. language isolate
  11. language isolates

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: language game (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “language game.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/language_game. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.