In Words and Things, Roger Brown (1958b:194) described what he called “the original word game.” His account went as follows:

He noted further that “[w]e play this game as long as we continue to extend our vocabularies and that may be as long as we live.” In this account, Brown recognized the essentially social nature of the exchanges between tutor and player. Effectively, tutors are the adult experts, and the players the children learning language. Adults offer both words and information about word meanings, and children try out their hypotheses about word meanings in their own uses of the words, with adults offering corrections when needed. These exchanges take place in the everyday conversations between children and adults (Clark 1999).