Charades

Charades (UK /ʃəˈrɑːdz/, US /ʃəˈreɪdz/) is a parlor or party word guessing game. Originally, the game was a dramatic form of literary charades: a single person would act out each syllable of a word or phrase in order, followed by the whole phrase together, while the rest of the group guessed. A variant was to have teams who acted scenes out together while the others guessed. Today, it is common to require the actors to mime their hints without using any spoken words, which requires some conventional gestures. Puns and visual puns were and remain common.

A charade was a form of literary riddle popularized in France in the 18th century where each syllable of the answer was described enigmatically as a separate word before the word as a whole was similarly described. William Mackworth Praed's poetic charades became famous. In the mid-19th century, the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica offered these two prose charades as "perhaps as good as could be selected":

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