Hangman
Mouse and keyboard
- Type a letter on your keyboard, or click it on the drawn keys under the word.
- A letter already spent is disabled; pressing it again is refused, says so, and costs nothing.
Touch
- Tap a letter on the drawn keyboard — every key is finger-sized, and the board never swallows a swipe, so you can still scroll the page.
- Tap Hint for the category on Easy and Medium, and New word to deal a fresh one.
This panel
- F full screen
- M sound on or off
- ? this list
- Esc close, or leave full screen
- The clock stops while the board is off screen
Loading Hangman…
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Your best
0
Win streak
0
Played
Your record
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No games finished yet. Play Hangman and your record for each difficulty shows up here.
| Board | Played | Won | Drawn | Win rate | Best | Fastest | Best run |
|---|
Awards for Hangman
- Clean gallows Win at Hangman without a single wrong letter. Needs: no wrong letters Locked
A file on your device. Moving it to another browser moves your record, your games and your initials with it.
About Hangman
Guess the word a letter at a time, before the rocket runs out of parts.
Hangman is the oldest guessing game that still works on a phone: a row of dashes, twenty-six letters, and the slow arithmetic of what is left.
What decides it is almost never the size of your vocabulary. It is which letters you spend and in what order, and the words that beat people are rarely the long ones. DUCK has four letters, and a player can spend five guesses on E, A, O, I and N without touching a single one of them.
Also searched for as
- hang man
- word guessing game
- guess the word game
- letter guessing game
- hangman solver practice
Whichever name you know it by, it is the same game: it runs in this browser, with no download and no sign-up.
Think a rule is wrong?
Tell us and we will check it against the published rules.
How to play Hangman
- A word is hidden behind one dash per letter. Choose a letter and every place it appears in the word is uncovered at once.
- A letter that is not in the word costs you one wrong guess. Easy allows eight, Medium six and Hard five, and the counter beside the board always shows how many are left.
- Every mistake takes a part off the rocket on the launch pad — clamps first, then fins, then boosters, then the porthole and the nose cone. When the last part goes, the word is revealed.
- A letter you have already spent is greyed out and cannot be pressed again. Pressing one costs you nothing: a misclick is not a move.
- Uncover every letter and the rocket lifts off. Easy shows the word's category from the start, Medium sells you the category for one guess, and Hard has no hint at all.
Strategy that actually helps
- Open with E, then A. In this game's word list E appears in 55% of the words and A in 50%, so the pair of them uncovers the skeleton of most boards faster than any consonant can.
- Spend about three guesses on vowels, then stop. Once you know where the vowels sit you have the shape of the word, and a fourth vowel is usually worth less than R, T, N, L or S — which turn up in 48%, 36%, 33%, 33% and 31% of the list respectively.
- Read the pattern, not just the letters. A doubled letter, an ER or ING ending, and a leading TH, SH or CH narrow the field much faster than another vowel does, and the length of the frame tells you which of those are even possible.
- Treat short words as the dangerous ones. On a four-letter word a wrong vowel costs exactly what a wrong consonant costs but rules out far less — which is why the Hard words here average 5.6 letters against Easy's 6.5, and are harder anyway.
- Learn what the Hard words have in common. Not one Easy word contains J, K, Q, V, X or Z; 70% of the Hard ones do. When E and A both come back empty, stop paying for vowels and go straight at K, W, Y and the doubled consonants — that is where DUCK, JAZZ, KAYAK and QUIZ are hiding.
Controls
Mouse and keyboard
- Type a letter on your keyboard, or click it on the drawn keys under the word.
- A letter already spent is disabled; pressing it again is refused, says so, and costs nothing.
Touch
- Tap a letter on the drawn keyboard — every key is finger-sized, and the board never swallows a swipe, so you can still scroll the page.
- Tap Hint for the category on Easy and Medium, and New word to deal a fresh one.
Questions
Is there a gallows in this version?
No. Each wrong guess takes a part off a rocket standing on a launch pad, and the last mistake leaves a bare hull tipped over on the pad. The game is exactly the one you know — uncover the word before the picture runs out — but it is drawn as a launch that fails rather than as an execution, which suits a site people open at school and at work.
What actually changes between Easy, Medium and Hard?
Three things, and every one of them is measured by a test. The words come from a different band, and the Hard band is built out of the letters a vowel-first opening never reaches. The allowance falls from eight wrong guesses to six to five. And the category hint is free on Easy, costs one guess on Medium, and does not exist on Hard. Each level also keeps its own record, so the three are never mixed together.
Are longer words harder to guess?
Usually the opposite, which is why this game does not use length as its difficulty. A longer word has more distinct letters in it, so more of them fall to the common openers, and each one you find gives you more pattern to read. The short words are the traps: DUCK, PLUM, OKRA and QUIZ are four letters each and beat most nine-letter words on the list.
Where do the words come from?
They were written for this game by hand — 466 common English nouns, four to nine letters long, each filed under one of twenty categories so that the hint is worth something. There are no proper nouns, no brands, no abbreviations and nothing crude, and a test checks all of that on every build rather than trusting anyone's memory.
Does a game I lose count for anything?
It counts as a game played, and nothing more. A personal best is a best at the game, so only a win can set one, and the figure kept is the number of guesses you spent — fewer is better, and a hint you paid for is counted in it. The record is stored per level on your own device, so an eight-guess Easy win never lands in the same column as a five-guess Hard one.