🪢 Hangman

How to play

The game picks a word from a list of twenty and shows you a blank slot for each of its letters, along with a one-line hint above them. Guess a letter and every occurrence of it is filled in; guess a letter that is not in the word and another part of the figure is drawn. You have six wrong guesses in total, one each for the head, the body, two arms and two legs. Fill the word before the drawing is finished and you win the round.

• Click a letter on the on-screen keyboard — guesses that letter. Used keys are disabled and coloured to show whether they were right or wrong.
• Type a letter key — the same guess from the keyboard. Only A to Z are accepted.
• New Word button — draws a fresh word and clears the figure, keeping the win and loss totals.

Scoring

There is no point total. The counters at the top show wrong guesses out of 6 for the current word, then your Wins and Losses across the session. A win is recorded the moment every letter is revealed and a loss on the sixth wrong guess, and in both cases the keyboard locks and the word is spelled out in the message. Neither total is reset by New Word, so they accumulate until you reload.

Tips

• Read the hint first. It is shown from the start and usually narrows the word to a handful of candidates.
• Open with vowels, then the common consonants R, S, T, N and L. Every word in the list is an ordinary English word.
• The number of slots is real information. An eight or nine letter word with a known ending often gives itself away.
• A wrong letter costs a sixth of your margin, so once you can see the shape of the word, guess the word's letters rather than continuing to sweep the alphabet.

Frequently asked questions