Attention language lovers: prepare to be taken prisoner. Willard R. Espy, word gamester extraordinaire, has put together more than 200 sublimely satisfying diversions — including acrostics, clerihews, epigrams, cryptograms, spoonerisms, palindromes, puns, and much, much more.

Presented here are the wildest array of tongue twisters, brainteasers, and other mind-benders new and old, along with notes on their histories, tips on how to play them or solve them, and page after page of mind-boggling challenges you won’t find anywhere else. It is a celebration of the energy, wit, flexibility, and fun of the English language by its most ardent aficionado.