As thray said, play is different. Play is specificly for large masses of test in an external file. It gives you the ability to send the clump of text via echo, msg, or notice in intervals. The number on the end is the interval. I multiplyed it by 1000 to get full seconds as the /play command requires milliseconds.
All you need to do is make a text file (like commands.txt) in your mirc file. Make it look like this:
!command1 - This is a description of command 1
!command1 - This is a description of command 2
!command1 - This is a description of command 1
!command1 - This is a description of command 4
!command1 - This is a description of command 5
...
!command999 - This is a description of command 999
Then, you use the play commands. Now the way I had it, it would read a line from the text file, send it via notice to the person, then waits (%delay) seconds, and sends another line. It continues to do so until all the lines of the text file are sent.
Yes, you dould have something like...
.timer 1 1 .notice $nick !command1 - This is a description of command 1
.timer 1 3 .notice $nick !command2 - This is a description of command 2
.timer 1 5 .notice $nick !command3 - This is a description of command 3
But I didn't think you wanted to write all those timer prefixes >:D