Rebus Puzzles: A Fun and Challenging Brain Teaser

 

Rebuses for children: pictures with letters, numbers and signs

We tell you the rules for composing and solving puzzles in order. Here are tasks with explanations and tips to practice the algorithm for finding an answer. With ghananeem, you will learn how to solve any puzzles and other logic tasks. We have everything you were looking for!

What is a rebus?

A rebus is an entertaining puzzle, a coding of one or more words using illustrations, letters, numbers and symbols. To solve a rebus means to decipher a word, phrase or whole phrase intended by the author.

A young why-why asks for an explanation: “Why solve rebuses at all?!” A cheat sheet about the benefits is here to help you.

The benefits of rebuses for children and adults

• develops logic: in order to correctly “read” a picture, you need to reason about the mutual arrangement of the puzzle elements, choose the right rules;
• develops memory: if a long word is encrypted in a rebus, you need to remember the solved parts of the word or phrase, as well as erroneous assumptions;
• develops non-standard thinking: the encrypted picture can be interpreted in different ways, and solving rebuses for speed can turn into an exciting game;
• regular training develops intelligence and speed of thinking;
• increases vocabulary.

How to learn to solve rebus puzzles?

Step by step, we will introduce you to examples of entertaining puzzles of varying difficulty levels. We provide answers and solution descriptions for some of the tasks.

Once you have mastered the entire material, you will be able to solve similar puzzles in no time.

Basic rules for reading rebuses

• Rebuses are read from left to right, in some cases - from top to bottom. There may be exceptions, which the authors of the task can indicate with text or arrows.
• Punctuation marks and spaces are not taken into account. This rule is relevant for large and complex rebuses, in which a long word or a whole phrase is encrypted.
• Any picture or symbol in the encryption has a meaning. Not a single comma or image is given in the rebus just like that. A picture and a symbol can mean a whole word or part of a word, depending on other conditions of the rebus.
• All words in the rebus are read in the nominative case, but you need to be careful with the singular and plural. If the picture shows a pair of legs, an eye or several fruits, the author of the rebus probably wants you to read the word in the plural.
• One of the most difficult tasks in a rebus is to understand "what did the author want to say?" In other words, to correctly interpret the picture. In the picture you can "see" a dog, but the author could have guessed the word "dog" or even "Hachiko". A boy with blond hair could be the word "boy" or the word "blond".
• The solution to the puzzle is always one! And if there are several, the author should warn you about it.
• Are you trying to solve a large, complex puzzle? Be prepared that it contains a sentence encrypted with not only nouns, but also other parts of speech.

Where did the rebus come from?

A rebus is a puzzle created using images of objects without using words (from Latin - "Non verbis sed rebus").

Their creators can safely be considered primitive people, who often communicated with others using primitive hieroglyphs. We should not forget about the ancient Egyptians, who came up with their own system of images of words and numbers in the 3rd-4th millennia BC.

The inhabitants of medieval France came up with the idea of ​​entertaining people by asking each other funny charades using pictures. At that time, rebuses were called street performances of wandering actors. Vagants in a humorous and ironic form with the help of pompous turns of phrase sought to laugh at the vices, negative traits and bad deeds of the rich. The nobility, of course, did not like this at all, so they did everything possible to ensure that comedians were officially banned in the 16th century.

Ordinary people were left without theatrical performances, but not without rebuses, which went to the masses and began to be passed on orally, turning into a witty and funny play on words. Residents began to invent drawn puzzles consisting of letters, numbers and various images, but without commas and strikethroughs - such great-great-grandfathers of modern rebuses. At that time, the designations of objects did not lead to a word-solution: they simply sounded similar.

These charades became such a popular pastime that already in the middle of the 16th century, French printers published the first ever collection of rebuses, authored by Etienne Taboureau. This famous collector and author of anagrams and acrostics compiled a book of funny stories, which were accompanied by corresponding images. The collection sold out in the shortest possible time, and the puzzles themselves eventually spread far beyond France, conquering the English, Italians and Germans.

Rebuses, which were used to convey religious tenets to children, deserve special mention. At the end of the 18th century, a children's Bible was published in England. To make it easier for children to understand and read, the illustrator Thomas Bewick replaced many complex statements with pictures. Children really liked this presentation of boring church dogmas, and their parents appreciated the religious zeal of their children. Around the same time, Isaiah Thomas published an analogue of this children's Bible in America, which contained even more illustrations. By the middle of the 19th century, puzzles had spread throughout the world, both in religious life and in everyday life. They decorated gates, entrance doors and even signs on various establishments.

And now let's turn to the puzzles themselves...

General rules for composing rebuses

• You can encode not just a word, but also a whole phrase: a proverb, a riddle, or a famous quote.
• The encrypted word (or phrase) is divided into its constituent parts, which can be represented as a picture and additional signs.
• You should solve the riddles in the same way as we read: from left to right. Sometimes you can find versions of riddles that are read from top to bottom.
• Punctuation marks (except for commas and apostrophes) are not used.
• If a single word is encrypted, it must be in the nominative case and singular.
• One of the main rules for composing a rebus is unambiguity. There should be no second possible interpretation of the entire image.

Techniques used when composing rebuses

1. The coded thing, animal or other object may have more than one name: "leg" = "limb" = "paw", "eyes" = "eyes", etc. It can also mean both a particular and a collective image, for example, "plant" - "grass" or "berry" - "raspberry". When choosing the appropriate meaning, you need to be very careful.

2. Sometimes in a rebus it is required to use only part of the pictured word. Then the number of remaining necessary letters is regulated by using a comma. If it is necessary to remove letters at the beginning, then the required number of commas is placed before the picture (usually in the center or at the top). If it is necessary to remove a certain number of letters at the end, then the corresponding number of commas is drawn after the picture (also in the center or at the top).

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