Word.ws English Dictionary

sokoban

sokoban noun: a video game whose gameplay consists of solving puzzles by pushing blocks in a grid.

Noun

sokoban (countable and uncountable, plural sokobans)

  1. A video game whose gameplay consists of solving puzzles by pushing blocks in a grid.
    • The sokoban problem encodes a small instance of a well known computer game, where a single stone must be pushed to its goal position.2000, Zbigniew W Ras, Setsuo Ohsuga, editors, Foundations of Intelligent Systems
    • I admire Dungeon and Puzzles for how efficiently made it is. It's a sokoban puzzle game about fighting through dungeons, and it's made predominantly by one person with art pulled from this $10 sprite tilset^([sic – meaning tileset]). […] It's lovely, basically. Dungeon And Puzzles is a simple game...2021 January 28, Graham Smith, “Dungeon And Puzzles is a lovely, efficient puzzle game”, in Rock Paper Shotgun, archived from the original on 26 Jul 2021

Proper noun capitalized: Sokoban

Sokoban

  1. A computer puzzle game, devised in 1981 and frequently reimplemented, in which the player must push boxes to designated locations under a set of movement constraints.
    • These so-called deadlock states are largely responsible for the failure of our attempts to solve positions in the game of Sokoban.1998, Robert Mercer, Eric Neufeld, Advances in Artificial Intelligence
    • The sokoban problem encodes a small instance of a well known computer game, where a single stone must be pushed to its goal position.2000, Zbigniew W Ras, Setsuo Ohsuga, editors, Foundations of Intelligent Systems

Forms of sokoban

pluralsokobans

Origin of sokoban

From the 1982 game Sokoban, from Japanese 倉庫番 (sōkoban, “warehouseman”).

Borrowed from Japanese 倉庫番 (sōkoban, “warehouseman”).

Questions about sokoban

What does sokoban mean?
Sokoban means a video game whose gameplay consists of solving puzzles by pushing blocks in a grid.
What part of speech is sokoban?
Sokoban can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of sokoban?
The plural of sokoban is sokobans.

Words near sokoban in the dictionary

  1. Sokhumi
  2. Sokil
  3. sokkie
  4. Sokna
  5. soko
  6. sokoban
  7. sokobans
  8. Sokodé
  9. Sokoke
  10. Sokokes
  11. Sokol

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sokoban (page history and authors); Sokoban (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-Sokoban.wav.

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