Rebus Puzzles with Answers — 40 Free Brain Teasers

What Is a Rebus Puzzle?

A rebus encodes a phrase in the positionof words rather than their definitions. The words themselves are ordinary; what matters is that one sits above another, or inside it, or backwards, or repeated, or split in half. Solving one means reading the layout as a sentence: MAN over BOARD is “man overboard”, the letter I under the word STAND is “I understand”. Rebuses are among the oldest word games there are — they predate crosswords by centuries and show up in heraldry, political cartoons, and children's primers.

How to Solve Rebus Puzzles

Nearly every rebus uses one of a handful of tricks. Once you know the vocabulary, the puzzles get much faster:

• Position — one word above, below, or inside another becomes over, under, or in.
• Repetition — a word printed three times can mean tri-, three, or again and again.
• Reversal — a word spelled backwards means backward, reverse, or about.
• Splitting — a word broken into pieces means split, divided, or half.
• Size — oversized or tiny text means big, small, or large.
• Orientation — upside-down text means out of, upside down, or topsy-turvy.
• Order — what comes first or last on the line becomes before or after.

Using Rebus Puzzles in the Classroom

Rebuses are one of the best five-minute bell-ringers in circulation. They need no prior knowledge, so a struggling reader and a strong reader start on equal footing, and they quietly drill prepositions — over, under, inside, before, after — which is exactly the vocabulary English learners need most. Project two or three at the start of class, let students call out guesses, then reveal the explanation. For a full worksheet, hit print: the forty puzzles come out on the page and the answer key prints separately at the end.

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