Mad Libs consist of a book that has a short story on each page with many key words replaced with blanks. Beneath each blank is specified a lexical or other category, such as "noun", "verb", "place", or "part of the body". One player asks the other players, in turn, to contribute some word for the specified type for each blank, but without revealing the context for that word. Finally, the completed story is read aloud. The result is usually comic, surreal and somewhat nonsensical.
For example, a Mad Lib sentence might initially look like this:
"One day, a ________________ went to ________ and _________________ a ______."
name of animal place past-tense verb noun
After completion, the sentence might read:
"One day, an '''octopus''' went to '''Exeter''' and '''drank''' a '''tea pot'''."
A game show called Mad Libs, with some connections to the game, aired on the Disney Channel in 1998 and 1999.
Several imitations of Mad Libs have been created, most of them on the Internet. Imitation Mad Libs are sometimes used in educational settings to help teach the parts of speech