A Pictionary phrase generator, and what is in it
This is the Pictionary word generator restricted to entries of two words or more: about 6990 of them, spanning every category and all three tiers. It is not only idioms. The easy tier is compound nouns that everyone says as one thing, hot dog, ice cream, school bus, remote control, ride a bike. The medium tier is where real phrases begin: actions with an object (flip a pancake, walk the dog, slip on a banana peel) and the first idioms (the elephant in the room, when pigs fly, a needle in a haystack). The hard tier, about 2495 phrases, is the classic Difficult card: the pot calling the kettle black, don’t judge a book by its cover, a skeleton in the closet, forgot my password. Set the Difficulty menu to Medium or Hard to skip the compounds and go straight to the sayings.
How to draw a phrase
- Count the words and draw the dashes. Five words, five dashes across the top of the paper. Guessers now know they are hunting for a phrase, not a thing, and will stop shouting single nouns.
- Draw the most concrete word first. Not the first word, the easiest picture. In the elephant in the room that is the elephant; in slip on a banana peel it is the peel.
- Point at the dash each picture belongs to. Pointing at your own drawing is allowed. It tells the team where the word sits in the sentence and lets them fill the small words themselves.
- Draw the scene, not the words. For an idiom, the literal picture almost always works: an elephant standing in a living room, a skeleton behind a closet door, a cat climbing out of a bag. Guessers are better at idioms than drawers expect.
- Leave the little words alone. The, a, in, on get guessed by grammar. Spend the minute on the nouns and verbs.
The full method, with worked examples and the common mistakes, is on the how to draw Pictionary words guide. The rules on what a drawer may and may not do are in the rules guide.
Idioms, situations and the Difficult card
The bank’s Idioms & Phrases category holds about 527 sayings, all of them phrases and all of them tagged D, the Difficult letter on an official card. That is the round Pictionary is famous for, and it is why the phrases page exists as its own generator: an evening of idioms is a different game from an evening of nouns. But the funniest phrases are often not idioms at all. They are situations, tagged across the other categories: parallel park, lose your keys, read the manual, talk with your mouth full, tangled Christmas lights. Flick on Funny words only to get those specifically.
Phrases for an adult game night
Phrases are the grown-up mode. Switch the audience to Adults and the pool adds the references that a mixed-age table would not get: the office holiday party, two weeks’ notice, swipe right, “you’re on mute”. Everything stays clean; adults-only on this site means grown-up, not rude. A good format is two teams, the difficulty on Medium for the first half and Hard for the second, and D counts double as a house rule so the idioms are worth going for. The adults page and the work page have set-ups for a party and for an office.
Phrases for kids and mixed tables
Children can play phrases, but pick the tier. The easy tier is compounds they already say as one word (ice cream, fire truck, hide and seek), and the easy idioms are the storybook ones: once upon a time, piece of cake, raining cats and dogs. For a family with a wide age range, give the children the one-word page on a second phone and the adults this one, and score both the same.
Printing a phrase list
The printable page lays any set out as cut-out cards, and the Idioms category prints as a pure phrase deck. More themes are on the ideas hub.
Last updated September 2026. Independent tool; Pictionary® is a trademark of Mattel, Inc.