Ask Team A to give you one of their words – you can either work through alphabetically, or let them choose letters at random.

Let’s imagine that Team A say chocolate. Team B’s word has to have more letters than chocolate to win the point. So as chocolate has 9 letters and cheese only has 6, Team A wins the point.
Then it is Team B’s turn. They say apple. Team A also has apple and so in this round, neither team wins a point. The winning word must always have more letters than the other word, so if both teams have a word with five letters, neither team gets the point.

If only one team has a word for a particular letter, they win a point. In the example above, Team A wins a point for doughnut as Team B doesn’t have a word.

This game works well with all age groups and levels and is very useful to practise specific vocabulary points (adjectives, verbs, animals, etc). You may like to advise students beforehand that longer words are better, and also encourage them to choose less obvious words to make it more likely that the other team won’t have the same.

I call the game Tennis as it makes it sound more interesting and makes students more willing to play. Another day I’ll tell you all about Las Vegas Grammar!