How to play hangman
- Pick a category and a level. A hidden word appears as a row of blanks, one for each letter.
- Guess a letter by tapping it or typing it on your keyboard. If it is in the word, it fills every blank where it belongs.
- If it is not, one more piece of the drawing goes up. Six wrong guesses complete the hangman and end the game.
- Find every letter before that happens to win. Press Enter or New word for the next one.
The category is always shown as a hint. Your wins, losses and winning streak are kept on this device; changing the word part-way through ends the streak.
The three levels
Every word here was put through a test: a computer player guessed it the way a good player does, always choosing the letter found in the most English words that still fit, and we counted how many wrong guesses it needed. In each category, Easy has the third of the words that needed the fewest, Hard the third that needed the most.
The result surprises most people: short words are hard, long words are easy. A long word has so many letters that almost any guess finds one, and each letter found narrows it down. A short word like fox or jazz gives almost nothing away. There is more on this, and the full list of the hardest words we found, on the hangman words page. For a set of nothing but those, choose Tricky words.
Tips for winning at hangman
- Start with vowels, E and A first. Nearly every word has at least one.
- Then the common consonants: T, N, S, R, H and L turn up in a large share of English words.
- Read the shape. Once a few letters are in, think of words that fit: a word ending in _ING or _ED, or a Q that is almost always followed by U.
- Use the category. In Countries or Animals, the list of possible words is much shorter than the whole dictionary.
- On short words, go for rarer letters sooner. Three blanks and an O could be dozens of words; a Y, X or Z can settle it.
Categories
There are eighteen: animals, food, fruit and vegetables, the ocean, space, weather, sports, jobs, school, countries, music, nature and autumn; Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas words; funny words such as kerfuffle and hullabaloo; and phrases, sayings like “piece of cake”, where the spaces between words are shown. Any category mixes all the single words together.
Hangman or balloons?
Some people would rather not draw a hanging man, especially with young children. Choose Balloons and a child holds a bunch of balloons instead: each wrong guess pops one. The game is exactly the same. The hangman for kids page uses balloons from the start, with easier words and more guesses.
Play with someone else
To choose the word yourself, for a friend, a class or your family, use two-player hangman. You can play on one screen or send the word as a link.
More word games: the word search has the same categories, and the memory game is good for younger players.