Hangman
Guesses left: 6
Pick a letter!
- Category
- Brain
- Players
- 1
- Controls
- Tap
- Words
- English
- Loads
- Plays instantly
Controls
| Tap a letter | Guess whether it appears in the word. |
| New game | Pick a fresh word. |
Next up
Guesses left: 6
Pick a letter!
| Tap a letter | Guess whether it appears in the word. |
| New game | Pick a fresh word. |
Hangman is the pencil-and-paper game everyone learns at school. A word is hidden, you guess letters one at a time, and every wrong guess costs you. Find the word before your attempts run out.
The reason it survives is that it rewards knowing how English actually works. The letter distribution of the language is not even, common patterns repeat, and a player who thinks about which letters are likely rather than which come to mind first wins far more often.
Open with vowels, but not all of them. E, A and O appear in the overwhelming majority of English words, and knowing where the vowels sit reveals the shape of the word. Spending every guess on vowels, though, wastes attempts on rarer ones like U.
Follow with the common consonants. After the vowels, R, S, T, L and N are the most frequent letters in English by a wide margin, which is exactly why they are given away in the final round of some television word games.
Use the word length. Short words are far more constrained than long ones, and once you have three or four letters in a six-letter word, there are usually only a handful of possibilities left.
Think about letter pairs. If you have found a Q it is almost certainly followed by U, and a word ending in a consonant followed by a gap often ends in E. English spelling patterns narrow things down enormously.
A fixed number, shown on screen. Each wrong letter costs one.
Vowels, particularly E and A, then the common consonants R, S, T, L and N.
Yes, the whole wordlist is English, built specifically for this version.
Very much. Shorter words have far fewer possibilities once you have a few letters.
Completely free, with no trial and no unlock. Hangman loads with the page and plays immediately, without an install step or a video ad first.