charade.
A genre of riddles where the clues to the answer are descriptions or puns on its syllables, with a final clue to the whole.
Meaning & usage
A genre of riddles where the clues to the answer are descriptions or puns on its syllables, with a final clue to the whole.
A single round of the game charades, an acted form of the earlier riddles.
A play resembling the game charades, particularly due to poor acting.
A deception or pretense, originally an absurdly obvious one but now in general use.
This whole charade is absurd.
A form of wordplay where several words are placed together to form a new word or part thereof.
Where this word comes from
From French charade, charrade (“prattle, idle conversation; a kind of riddle”), probably from Occitan charrada (“conversation; chatter”), from charrar (“to chat; to chatter”) + -ada. As a round of the game, originally a clipping of acting charade but now usually understood and formed as a back-formation from charades.
To act out a charade (of); to gesture; to pretend.
Where this word comes from
From French charade, charrade (“prattle, idle conversation; a kind of riddle”), probably from Occitan charrada (“conversation; chatter”), from charrar (“to chat; to chatter”) + -ada. As a round of the game, originally a clipping of acting charade but now usually understood and formed as a back-formation from charades.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.