Mad Libs (a play on ad lib, from Latin ad libitum - as you wish) is a word game where one player prompts another for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story; these word substitutions have a humorous effect when the resulting story is then read aloud. The game is especially popular with American children and is frequently played as a party game or as a pastime. Many teenagers like to substitute clean words with profanity, racial slurs, and sexual innuendo.
Mad Libs was invented in 1953 by Leonard Stern and Roger Price, who published the first Mad Libs book themselves in 1958. Mad Libs books are still published by Price Stern Sloan, an imprint of Penguin Group, cofounded by Price and Stern