Charades ideas, sorted by how hard they are to act

A charades round is decided by the word more than by the actor. Twenty performers in van Nispen, van de Sandt-Koenderman and Krahmer's study mimed the same sixty objects, and judges named the scissors 92% of the time and the asparagus never. Actions with nothing in the hands rate 5.85 out of 7 for how obviously their gesture points at their meaning. Objects you cannot pick up rate 3.92. Those ratings are Ortega and Özyürek's. They asked twenty Dutch adults to invent a silent gesture for each of 272 words. Eighteen more people then rated an actor's version of the 109 gestures at least half the group had produced the same way. Verbs won. Nouns you cannot hold lost.

Charades lists sort by theme, by age, or into difficulty tiers with nothing stated behind them. The only meaning of difficulty that matters is how hard the word is to act.

This page carries 388 words, grouped by category and by difficulty, where difficulty means difficulty to act rather than difficulty to know. Elephant is easy because it comes with a trunk. Jealousy is hard because there is nothing to point at. The rest of the page is the part that decides whether the round works. How long a round should run. How to size the teams. What to do when nobody can act the word, and the house rules that end the argument before it starts.

What makes a charades word easy or hard to act

Three properties decide whether a word survives contact with a room, and none of them is how common the word is.

Your body can do the thing. Actions with nothing else in them came top of Ortega and Özyürek's ratings at 5.85. Actions involving an object came next at 5.24, and objects you cannot pick up came last at 3.92. A verb hands the actor a body to borrow. A building hands them nothing, so they end up drawing it in the air, which is a different game.

There is one obvious way to show it. van Nispen, van de Sandt-Koenderman and Krahmer filmed twenty people miming the sixty objects of a clinical naming test. A second group watched the clips and said what they saw. Objects with a default mime, one technique nearly everyone reached for, were understood better than objects where each person invented their own. Miming how you hold a thing beat miming its outline, and tools beat animals.

The gesture has to depict, not decorate. Dargue, Sweller and Jones pooled 83 independent samples covering 3,883 people. Gestures that pictured something helped comprehension. Beat gestures, the kind that keep time with the hands and picture nothing, had an effect that was not different from zero. Every sample in it paired gesture with speech, which charades takes away, so treat it as a rule about hands rather than a result about the game.

Put the three together and you can grade a word before you use it. Can somebody perform it with their body, is there one way nearly everyone would show it, and does the gesture picture the thing rather than fill the time. Three yeses is an easy word. One yes is a hard one. Zero is a word to cut.

That is why the bank behind our free charades generator is sorted the way it is. The line under its difficulty control reads "How hard it is to act out, not how rare the word is", and the difficulty tiers below are sorted the same way.

Easy charades ideas

Easy means the gesture is close to automatic. Somebody starts it and the answer arrives before they have finished. Use these to open, and use them when nobody has played before and needs one fast win to believe the game is possible.

Easy actions

1. Sneezing
2. Running
3. Clapping
4. Yawning
5. Swimming
6. Brushing your teeth
7. Waving goodbye
8. Eating soup
9. Tying your shoes
10. Reading a book
11. Taking a photo
12. Dancing
13. Drinking through a straw
14. Blowing out a candle
15. Knocking on a door
16. Washing your hands
17. Putting on a coat
18. Climbing a ladder
19. Juggling

Easy animals

1. Elephant
2. Monkey
3. Snake
4. Rabbit
5. Cat
6. Duck
7. Kangaroo
8. Frog
9. Horse
10. Bird
11. Dog
12. Fish
13. Cow
14. Bee
15. Penguin
16. Chicken
17. Pig
18. Spider

Easy jobs

1. Chef
2. Doctor
3. Teacher
4. Firefighter
5. Hairdresser
6. Painter
7. Postal worker
8. Farmer
9. Cleaner
10. Driver
11. Waiter
12. Builder
13. Dentist
14. Gardener
15. Singer

Easy objects

1. Umbrella
2. Razor
3. Rolling pin
4. Key
5. Clock
6. Mirror
7. Scissors
8. Kettle
9. Pillow
10. Broom
11. Sunglasses
12. Guitar
13. Telephone
14. Hammer
15. Torch

Easy food and drink

1. Pizza
2. Banana
3. Ice cream
4. Spaghetti
5. Popcorn
6. Egg
7. Apple
8. Watermelon
9. Sandwich
10. Cake
11. Corn on the cob
12. Tea
13. Lollipop
14. Chewing gum
15. A drink that is far too hot

Easy sports

1. Football
2. Basketball
3. Tennis
4. Boxing
5. Golf
6. Skiing
7. Cycling
8. Bowling
9. Skipping
10. Diving
11. Yoga
12. Darts
13. A goal celebration
14. Weightlifting

Charades ideas for adults

The word is still visible in the adult tier, but it takes two or three gestures in sequence rather than one, and somebody has to commit to it in front of colleagues. These land at a party, at an offsite, and at the end of a long meeting. The generator calls this tier Medium.

Everyday actions

1. Parallel parking
2. Threading a needle
3. Untangling headphones
4. Folding a fitted sheet
5. Wrapping a present
6. Shovelling snow
7. Changing a tyre
8. Conducting an orchestra
9. Putting up a shelf
10. Fishing
11. Assembling flat-pack furniture
12. Hailing a taxi
13. Carrying too many bags
14. Opening a jar that will not open
15. Taking a selfie
16. Defrosting a windscreen
17. Queueing
18. Reversing with a trailer

Animals

1. Mouse
2. Octopus
3. Giraffe
4. Crab
5. Owl
6. Sloth
7. Woodpecker
8. Flamingo
9. Hedgehog
10. Starfish
11. Camel
12. Seal
13. Swan
14. Pelican
15. Ostrich
16. Peacock
17. Tortoise

Jobs

1. Photographer
2. Librarian
3. Electrician
4. Vet
5. Lifeguard
6. Tailor
7. Mechanic
8. Florist
9. Pilot
10. Referee
11. Barista
12. Plumber
13. Air steward
14. Window cleaner
15. Removal person

Objects

1. Stapler
2. Corkscrew
3. Washing machine
4. Vacuum cleaner
5. Hammock
6. Wheelbarrow
7. Telescope
8. Typewriter
9. Revolving door
10. Shopping trolley
11. Hole punch
12. Bicycle pump
13. Deckchair
14. Ironing board
15. Tent

Food and drink

1. Pomegranate
2. Artichoke
3. Candy floss
4. Sushi
5. Toast
6. Pancake
7. Coconut
8. Olive
9. Pretzel
10. Smoothie
11. Oyster
12. Spaghetti you cannot cut
13. A sandwich with too much in it
14. Corn you cannot get off the cob
15. A biscuit that breaks in the tea

Sports and hobbies

1. Archery
2. Rowing
3. Surfing
4. Gymnastics
5. Ice skating
6. Table tennis
7. Rock climbing
8. Hurdles
9. Pole vault
10. Knitting
11. Birdwatching
12. Trampolining
13. Skateboarding
14. Paddleboarding
15. Fencing

Office charades ideas

These work with colleagues who share an office, because the reference is already in the room. A team that has never shared one has no badge, no lift and no biscuit tin.

1. Joining a call late
2. Muting yourself
3. Unmuting yourself too late
4. A printer jam
5. A laptop battery dying
6. Sharing the wrong window
7. A badge that will not scan
8. A swivel chair
9. A whiteboard
10. A fire drill
11. A lanyard
12. A standing desk
13. Hot desking
14. The coffee machine
15. The last biscuit in the tin
16. A lift that stops at every floor
17. A birthday card being passed round
18. An office plant nobody waters

Why this list has no film titles

Films are missing from every list above, and that is on purpose. A title is guessed word by word, so what it tests is who has heard of the film rather than who can mime. Titles date, too, which turns a page meant to last into a list that reads as stale. If your group genuinely shares a set of films, that beats anything published, and Decka's Charades activity runs a list you type in yourself instead of the bank.

Hard charades ideas

A hard word has no body to borrow. The actor has to build the meaning out of two or three ideas in a row, and the room has to hold the first one while the second arrives. Save these for a group that has already won a few rounds, and keep the full ninety seconds rather than the sixty an easy word can survive.

Abstract actions and states

1. Procrastinating
2. Apologising
3. Eavesdropping
4. Negotiating
5. Regretting a text
6. Pretending to listen
7. Gloating
8. Reluctantly agreeing
9. Losing your train of thought
10. Stalling for time
11. Being politely bored
12. Changing your mind
13. Deciding not to say something
14. Being suspicious
15. Pretending you remember someone's name
16. Realising you left the oven on

Hard animals

1. Chameleon
2. Praying mantis
3. Platypus
4. Jellyfish
5. Anteater
6. Bat
7. Stick insect
8. Meerkat
9. Narwhal
10. Hermit crab
11. Armadillo
12. Pufferfish
13. Moth

Hard jobs

A mime can land on the work and still miss the title. Nothing a body does separates an actuary from an accountant once the spreadsheet is in the air, which is why both are here.

1. Auctioneer
2. Air traffic controller
3. Beekeeper
4. Sommelier
5. Accountant
6. Cartographer
7. Stunt double
8. Architect
9. Proofreader
10. Meteorologist
11. Archaeologist
12. Translator
13. Quantity surveyor
14. Sound engineer
15. Actuary

Hard objects

1. Spirit level
2. Metronome
3. Sundial
4. Bellows
5. Abacus
6. Tripod
7. Pulley
8. Compass
9. Hourglass
10. Loom
11. Weather vane
12. Bear trap
13. Barometer
14. Tuning fork
15. Plumb line

Hard food and drink

1. Soufflé
2. Fondue
3. Leftovers
4. Burnt toast
5. A stale biscuit
6. Food you are too polite to refuse
7. An ice cube
8. A diet
9. Something you dropped
10. The last slice
11. A mystery casserole
12. Seconds you did not need
13. A meal that arrived cold
14. The wrong order
15. A drink you spilled on yourself

Hard sports and hobbies

1. Curling
2. Synchronised swimming
3. Sumo wrestling
4. Bouldering
5. Javelin
6. Hang gliding
7. Chess
8. Marathon training
9. Scuba diving
10. Orienteering
11. Origami
12. Dressage
13. Geocaching
14. Competitive eating
15. Ballroom dancing

Charades phrases and idioms

An idiom is the hardest tier there is, because the actor has to signal that the phrase is a phrase before acting any part of it. The convention is fingers held up for the number of words, then the words in order. Give these two minutes, and only to a room that is already warm.

1. Raining cats and dogs
2. Spill the beans
3. Break the ice
4. Hit the nail on the head
5. Cold feet
6. Butterflies in your stomach
7. A piece of cake
8. Bite the bullet
9. Under the weather
10. Let the cat out of the bag
11. Hold your horses
12. On cloud nine
13. A needle in a haystack
14. Burning the midnight oil
15. Jumping the gun
16. Pulling someone's leg
17. Sitting on the fence
18. Walking on eggshells
19. Throwing in the towel
20. Over the moon
21. Saved by the bell
22. Barking up the wrong tree
23. The elephant in the room
24. A storm in a teacup

Words that look easy and are not

Every one of these reads as simple and dies on its feet. Being a common word is not the same as being an actable one, which is what the second test above measures. Plenty of abstract words do have a conventional gesture, and those are the ones to keep. Hands crossed over the heart mean love in almost any room, crossed fingers mean luck, and a finger to the lips means quiet. The words below have no shorthand of their own. Each actor invents one, or borrows a gesture that lands on a different word, and the room never converges.

1. Cousin
2. Music
3. Internet
4. Tuesday
5. Plastic
6. Science
7. Weather
8. Neighbour
9. History
10. Honest
11. Blue
12. Language
13. Later
14. Almost
15. Government
16. Tomorrow

How to run a round of charades

Most of what wrecks a round is decided before anybody acts, by a facilitator making four choices by accident.

How long a round should be. Ninety seconds is the default in Charades on Decka, and the range runs from thirty seconds to five minutes. Ninety is long enough for a two-part word and short enough that the room stays loud. Drop to sixty for easy words with a group that is already warm. Go to two minutes for idioms, and only for idioms.

Who acts next. Volunteers, in the order the hands go up. Never hand a round to a named person who has not offered, however much you want to draw a quiet one in. The spotlight is the cost of this game, and a kind motive does not change who pays it. Decka has two settings for it. Take turns gives the next word to whoever has performed fewest times, so nobody goes twice before everybody has gone once. You act lets you name the performer for each round, and its label oversells what it does: it is presenter-picks, which is the thing this section is telling you not to do. Either way the performer is somebody who joined from a phone, so when the hands stop going up, perform the next round yourself off the app rather than naming a name.

How big the teams are. Small. Latané, Williams and Harkins had people clap and shout as loudly as they could, alone and in groups. Two-person groups produced 71% of the sum of what those same people managed alone, four-person groups 51%, and six-person groups 40%. That was physical effort rather than guessing, so read it as a warning rather than a measurement of your game. The warning is enough. Six a team is the ceiling worth risking, and two teams of five beat one team of ten.

Whether the room is one group or several. In Fay, Garrod and Carletta's five-person groups, people were influenced most by whoever they had actually talked to. In their ten-person groups, people were influenced most by whoever talked most. Those groups were undergraduates discussing a plagiarism case for twenty minutes, not a room guessing, and five and ten were the only sizes tested. Ten people guessing out loud is one loud person guessing and nine people watching. Either split into teams, or have people type their guesses instead of shouting, so volume stops deciding who gets heard.

One thing the product does not do, worth knowing before you plan around it. Decka's charades activity scores individuals rather than teams. The person who guesses correctly earns the points, and the performer earns the same amount, but only when somebody solves it. Team scoring is on paper, on a flipchart, or not at all.

What to do when nobody can guess it

The silence is more normal than it feels, and there is a number for how normal.

In van Nispen and colleagues' study, judges who watched a mimed object and wrote down what it was named it correctly 29% of the time. A second set of judges watched the same clips with four pictures to choose from, one of them the answer, and scored 97%. The mime did not change. What changed was how much of the answer the guesser was handed before they started.

Say the category out loud before the clock starts. Name the list the word came off: animal, job, action, object, food, sport, phrase, or a state of mind. A category is the cheapest thing you can tell the room. No study on this page measures that, so treat it as a house rule rather than a result.

The rest of the rescue, in the order to try it:

• Name the category, if you have not. Then name the tier, so the room knows the word was picked to be hard rather than acted badly.
• Let the room guess out loud, continuously. Galantucci and Garrod review drawing experiments in which a partner could signal back. Even a tick to say they understood changed what the person drawing did next. Guesses aloud are how an actor finds out which half of the mime landed.
• Let the actor restart. A second attempt from a different angle is worth more than the rest of the clock on the first one.
• Offer the swap once. One pass per performer per game, and they get a new word from the same tier. Allow unlimited passes and the hard tier stops being played.
• Call it and move on. Say the word, start the next round, and if the word was unfair give the actor the point anyway on paper. In the app a round nobody solved pays neither side. The next round starts straight away.

When a word dies twice in one session, cut it from the list rather than blaming the actor. A word nobody can act is a bad word, and the three tests above are the cheapest way to find the next one before a room does.

The house rules that stop an argument

Charades has no governing body and its rules genuinely vary. Agree these five out loud before the first round and you will not be settling them mid-game.

No talking, no mouthing, no pointing at objects in the room. Pointing at a real chair to mean chair is where groups disagree. Ban it explicitly, because the ambiguity is what causes the row rather than the pointing.

Sounds are out, including humming. If you want sounds, say so at the start and apply it to everybody, and expect the game to get easier and less funny.

Say the category before the clock starts. This is the rule from the section above, and it is the difference between a round and a staring contest.

Close enough counts, and the actor decides. Not the room, not the presenter. The person holding the word answers with a nod or a shake of the head, once, and the round ends. Any other arrangement produces a committee.

The clock is the clock. Nobody gets a bonus ten seconds for being nearly there. Everybody is nearly there.

Charades ideas for kids

Children need a different list, and not because they know fewer words. Reading meaning off a moving body is a skill that keeps developing well into the teens.

Ross, Polson and Grosbras showed people short clips of actors performing an emotion, once in full light and once as moving dots on a black background. Adults named the emotion correctly 94.3% of the time in full light and 81.1% from the dots alone. Sixteen and seventeen year olds managed 90% and 68.7%, still significantly below the adults. Their study was about emotion rather than charades and only fourteen adults took part, so hold it loosely. It points where common sense points. Give a child a thing with a shape, never a feeling.

For younger children

1. Riding a bike
2. Blowing bubbles
3. A butterfly
4. A snowman
5. A birthday cake
6. A rocket
7. A train
8. A lion
9. A helicopter
10. A teddy bear
11. A dinosaur
12. A wobbly tooth
13. Eating an ice cream
14. A bouncy castle
15. A slide
16. A kite
17. A tractor
18. A pirate
19. A ballerina
20. A crocodile
21. Brushing a dog
22. A caterpillar
23. Hopscotch
24. A frog jumping
25. An aeroplane
26. A cat washing itself
27. A snail
28. Building a sandcastle
29. A duck in a puddle
30. Carrying a very full cup

For older children

1. A superhero landing
2. Scoring a goal
3. A magician
4. A robot
5. A skateboarder
6. A scientist with a test tube
7. A ninja
8. Carrying far too much at once
9. A rollercoaster
10. A goalkeeper diving
11. An astronaut
12. A chef tasting soup
13. A cheerleader
14. A detective following a clue
15. A knight
16. A dragon
17. Someone stuck in a lift
18. A tightrope walker
19. A drummer
20. A vet with a very large dog

Running it with a class

Keep rounds to sixty seconds, keep teams to four, and let two volunteers act together for the first round of the day. A pair is far less exposed than a soloist, which matters most in the round where nobody has seen anybody else do it yet. If you want printed words rather than a screen, the charades generator prints the list it gives you.

What a round of charades actually does

Charades pages tend to claim the game builds memory, communication skills and team bonding, usually with no source at all. Two of those three are worth stating carefully, and one is worth taking off the table.

Take the memory claim off the table first. Steffens, von Stülpnagel and Schult reviewed the literature on whether doing a thing is remembered better than watching somebody else do it. Across the 36 free-recall experiments where every action was either performed or watched, never mixed, only seven reported an advantage for doing. Mixed lists are the case where the advantage does turn up, and their own conclusion is still that a memory advantage of enactment over observation does not generally exist. Anyone who tells you charades makes the words stick is ahead of the evidence.

What the evidence does support is narrower. Fay, Lister, Ellison and Goldin-Meadow had 92 students build a communication system from scratch in pairs, with no shared words. Some pairs used gesture alone, some used non-linguistic vocalisation alone, and some used both. Gesture alone beat vocalisation alone, both at getting meaning across and at building a shared vocabulary inside the pair. Hands are what people reach for when language is taken away, and they are good at it.

The kind of gesture matters as much as the fact of it. Macedonia and von Kriegstein's review describes an experiment in which German speakers learned 92 invented nouns, half encoded with gestures that depicted the meaning and half with gestures that meant nothing. The depicting gestures produced better memory in the short term and after sixty days. Movement alone was not the thing that helped. Movement that pictured something was.

The laughing is doing something too. Dunbar and colleagues ran six experimental studies using pain threshold as a proxy for endorphin release. Thresholds came out significantly higher after laughter than in a control condition, an effect they put down to laughter itself rather than to a change in mood. They suggest it may play a part in social bonding. Suggest is their word and it is the right one.

There is a cost that none of those claims mention. Charades is a spotlight. One person stands at the front, alone, watched on purpose, and that is the game working rather than the game going wrong. Being the named person at the front is the specific thing people object to about openers, and ice breakers that aren't cringe carries the survey evidence for it. So take volunteers, and only volunteers. If no hands go up, that is the room answering, and there are plenty of icebreaker games that put nobody at the front.

So run charades because a room watching one person fail to mime a woodpecker is a room paying attention, and because it costs ninety seconds a round. That is a good enough reason on its own. If you want the drawing version instead, Doodler Decoy puts one team on the pen and every other team on inventing a convincing lie about what is being drawn.

The game is older than most of the arguments about it. The word charade reached English in 1776 from French, where it meant a syllable riddle rather than anything acted. The silent acted version came later. Nobody has agreed on the rules since. Which is why you say them out loud first.