Hangman
Play Hangman by category or level, or make your own word list to share with a friend or a class.
Guess the hidden word one letter at a time before the drawing is finished. Play random words at Easy, Medium or Hard, pick a category such as animals or countries, or type your own words for a friend or a class and share them as a link.
The game runs in your browser. Your stats, recent words and a game in progress stay on this device, so a reload picks up where you left off.
How to use it
Guess with your keyboard or the on-screen keys. A letter in the word appears in every place it occurs; a letter not in it is struck through on the keys and costs a life, and the drawing gains a part. Guessing the same letter twice costs nothing. You start with 6 lives, the classic figure of head, body, two arms and two legs; with 8 or 10 the gallows is drawn in stages first.
Guess the word solves it outright. A wrong word costs a life; a guess of the wrong length, or one you already made, is refused at no cost. Hint reveals the hidden letter that appears most often in the word, for one life. It needs 2 or more lives left and 2 or more different letters still hidden, so the last letter is always yours to find. A win with a hint counts as played in your stats, not won, and ends your streak.
- Random word draws from 1,956 Easy, 2,765 Medium and 884 Hard words, never repeating one of your last 50 at a level.
- Category plays lists written for the site: Animals (154), Countries (193), Food (108), Fruit & vegetables (89), Sports (83), Jobs (95), Body (86), Nature (92), Household (89), Science (99). Phrases such as “polar bear” show their spaces and hyphens from the start.
- Your words takes one word or phrase a line, up to 200, each 2 to 30 letters A–Z, with spaces, hyphens and apostrophes between them. Repeats are dropped. The words are hidden as you type, with a switch to show them, so they can be entered with a player watching. Play here plays them in a shuffled order with a running score, and Copy link makes a link that opens the same list. The link hides the words from a glance, but anyone can decode it, so it is not secret.
For a class, write the week's spelling or topic words as a list and share the link: each pupil gets them in their own order. Starting a new word after a guess counts the one in progress as lost. Stats are kept for each level and category; your own words keep a score instead, of the words won without a hint. Each word counts in it once: a word skipped, or left after a guess for other settings, counts as lost and the list moves on to the next word.
How the levels are chosen
Every random word is a common English word in its base form, from the same list the site's word games use, which leaves out offensive words. Its level comes from how a strong player would fare: one who always guesses the letter found in the most words of that length still fitting what is shown, and so learns as much as possible from every guess. The words that player finds with few wrong letters are easy; those that cost many are hard.
- Easy: 4 to 6 letters, with at most 2 wrong letters for that player.
- Medium: 5 to 8 letters, with 3 to 5 wrong letters for that player.
- Hard: 4 to 8 letters, with 6 or more wrong letters for that player.
Hard words are short, with few different letters, rare letters such as J, Z, K and V, or many look-alikes that differ by one letter: after the vowels are found, the last letter could still be any of several.
Worked examples: what makes a word hard
- ABLE
- 1 wrong letter
- RATE
- 8 wrong letters
- JAZZ
- 11 wrong letters
- PUFF
- 13 wrong letters
All four have four letters. ABLE has a rare shape, so a few common letters pin it down. RATE is made of the most common letters, yet it costs more than 6 wrong guesses: once A, T and E show, R, D, F, G, H, L, M, P all still fit the blank before ATE. JAZZ and PUFF have only three different letters, and rare ones.
Letters by how many words hold them
| Letter | Words holding it |
|---|---|
| E | 42% |
| R | 39% |
| O | 39% |
| T | 36% |
| I | 35% |
| A | 35% |
| L | 34% |
| S | 33% |
| N | 31% |
| U | 31% |
| C | 24% |
| Y | 21% |
| H | 20% |
| P | 19% |
| D | 19% |
| M | 18% |
| G | 14% |
| B | 12% |
| F | 12% |
| W | 10% |
| K | 9% |
| V | 6% |
| J | 2% |
| Q | 2% |
| X | 1% |
| Z | 1% |
Frequently asked questions
See also
- Word Guess Game — for another word game, guessing a whole word from colour clues.
- Word Ladder — to turn one word into another a letter at a time.
- Word Search Maker — to make a printable word search from the same word list.