charade

noun

1. (archaic)A genre of riddles where the clues to the answer are descriptions or puns on its syllables, with a final clue to the whole.
2. (uncommon)A single round of the game charades, an acted form of the earlier riddles.

   “...The most popular form of this amusement is the acted charade, in which the meaning of the different syllables is acted out on the stage, the audience being left to guess each syllable and thus, combining the meaning of all the syllables, the whole word. A brilliant example of the acted charade is described in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.”

3. (obsolete)A play resembling the game charades, particularly due to poor acting.
4. A deception or pretense, originally an absurdly obvious one but now in general use.

   “This whole charade is absurd.”

   “The woman lying dead in the morgue was the woman at the party. Well, Victor, maybe I'm missing something here. You call it fake, a charade… Do you mind telling me what kind of fuckin' charade ends up with somebody turning up dead?”

5. A form of wordplay where several words are placed together to form a new word or part thereof.

   “Sometimes the tricks above may be used in combination: a homophone may come in two pieces like a charade (RAINBOW sounding like REIGN + BEAU) or a charade may be reversed (TACKLE having ELK + CAT backwards).”

   “Takes is a bit of a charade indicator here, telling you that one word takes on or adds on to another.”

   “Try solving the following clues. They are all charades, some of which use link words of the types described above.”

verb

1. To act out a charade (of); to gesture; to pretend.

   “I'm not trying to say: let's try to get away from power rituals because power manifestation is a very important part of sex. It is when it takes the form of charading gay punishment, punishing one of our own in order to allow him a gay contact.”

   “She flaps her hands and arms, eyes glaring, head shaking – charading Non, non, NON!”

   “Private, wholesome family time could no longer charade as being either private or wholly wholesome.”