Best Picture Books Celebrating Word Play and Words

Word play helps kids love language, it inspires writing and helps kids learn new vocabulary. Celebrate the love of words in these best, playful picture books all about words.

Download Printable List of Word Play Books

Best Picture Books Celebrating Word Play and Words

P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever

Lexie the Word Wrangler The Boy Who Loved Words The Great Dictionary Caper The Word Collector Betty’s Burgled Bakery: An Alliteration Adventure Top Dog: And Other Doggone Delightful Expressions Wordplay: TOON Level 1 (Toon Books)E-mergency Take Away the A Alphabetter (Peace Dragon)Noah Webster’s Fighting Words Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster

P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter, illustrated by Maria Beddia
The subtitle of this book reads, “All the letters that misbehave and make words nearly impossible to pronounce.” Get your kids, sit by the fire, and prepare to enjoy a celebration of words with surprising pronunciations that don’t follow the standard phonics rules. In this book, “A is for Aisle” and “H is for Heir“. So fun, right? Below each letter and illustration is a sentence describing each word like, “M is for Mnemonic. // But now Mr. M. can’t remember why.” Isn’t this a delight for readers and writers of all ages?

Lexie the Word Wrangler by Rebecca Van Slyke, illustrated by Jessie Hartland

Lexie’s a word wrangler, a cowgirl who mixes up fresh words each morning like corn and bread to make cornbread or turn an annoying pest into good pets. But someone is stealing letters and words from her ranch. Instead of a rainbow, she only sees a bow. Will she catch the sneaky word rustler? A thoroughly delightful adventure!

The Great Dictionary Caper by Judy Sierra, illustrated by Eric Comstock

After words escape from the Dictionary, it’s a romp through grammar and word play. Homophones, palindromes, rhyming words, anagrams and more strut their stuff through the book’s pages until they’re called back inside the dictionary.

What a Wonderful Word: A Collection of Untranslatable Words From Around the World by Nicola Edwards, illustrated by Luisa Uribe

Budding wordsmiths will love reading these most interesting words that don’t translate into other languages. Words like the Icelandic “gluggavedur” which means “window weather”, “weather that looks beautiful while you’re inside, but is much to cold when you step outside.” I especially love the Japanese word “nakama” that means “friends who are like family”. Each word is defined and illustrated with text that explains further context and meaning.

The Word Collector by Peter H. Reynolds

Get inspired by this book about a boy named Jerome who loves words so much that he collects them! As he collects, Jerome notices the beauty of pairing words unexpectedly. Then, he realizes that he must share the words with the whole world. Use this beautiful book to inspire your own word collections.

Betty’s Burgled Bakery An Alliteration Adventure by Travis Nichols

It’s both hilarious and impressive to read a mystery adventure written in alliterative sentences. Betty has enlisted the help of the police to solve the crime of who burgled her bakery. And you’ll never believe who did it!! Sure to be a new read aloud favorite, especially for teachers to use in writing workshop.

Top Dog and Other Doggone Delightful Expressions by Carli Davidson

You don’t have to be a dog lover to love this fun book that gives you all lots of dog-ish expressions with photos of the cutest dogs EVER. “Working like a dog. / Raining Cats and Dogs. / Dog and Pony Show.” Each page is framable because these photographs are stunning! Added to Favorite Dog Books for Kids.

Word Play by Ivan Brunetti

In this simple graphic novel, a teacher helps her students learn about compound words. The kids excitedly think of lots of compound words even at home.

E-mergency by Tom Lichtenheld, illustrated by Ezra Fields-Meyer

This punny book is very clever. When E takes a tumble down the stairs, in order for E to heal, everyone must stop using her in all their words. O (who is so well-rounded) takes her place making this book hilarious and quite challenging to read out loud! AftOr all, wO usO thO lOttOr a lot! But, E doesn’t heal. Is someone still using the letter E? Like THE NARRATOR!? Hmmm. . .

Take Away the A by Michael Escoffier, illustrated by Kris Di Giacomo
What happens when you remove the letter A? Well, Beast becomes best. How about the letter D? Dice becomes ice. Super funny with an unexpected plot!

Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster by Debra Frasier

When a cold results in a hilarious and embarrassing misunderstanding of words, readers will delight in language, especially synonyms.

The Boy Who Loved Words by Roni Schotter, illustrated by Giselle Potter
This beautiful picture book swells, sparkles, harmonizes and percolates with main character, Selig’s (also called Wordsworth’s,) passion for words. “You too may find yourself lucky if, one day, while you are thinking or writing or simply speaking, the perfect word just seems to come to you. If so, you’ll know that Selig is near.”

Alphabetter by Linda Ragsdale, illustrated by Martina Hogan

You’ll love this playful alphabet book full of positive, fun invented words that are combinations of other words. What will you find on the C page? How about choolo (choose + love) and charvelous (charming + marvelous). Sure to inspire many playful inventions of your own as well as new additions to your every day vocabulary.

Noah Webster’s Fighting Words by Tracy Nelson Maurer, illustrated by Mircea Catusanu

This biographical story is an important piece of American history that kids should know — it’s fascinating. The narrative includes “edits” from Noah Webster himself which make this lively story even more interesting. The illustrations are absolutely perfect — in style and in color. Bravo for organizing words!

Ann and Nan are Anagrams: A Mixed-Up Word Dilemma by Mark Shulman & Adam McCauley
Anagrams are words that when mixed up spell different words or phrases using all the letters. The authors make it easy to tell by putting the anagrams in similar fonts and tell the story of a mixed-up word world. This would be a fantastic book for an elementary classroom.
“Bring me to your AUNT. She’s A NUT.”
“Poor Grandma! What a VILE, EVIL way to LIVE.”