How to play hangman

How do you play hangman?

In pairs or in a group, with one person setting and everybody else guessing. The setter thinks of a word and draws one short dash for each letter, keeping the word itself hidden. Guessers call out single letters. If the letter is in the word, the setter writes it above every dash where it belongs; if it is not, the setter draws one part of the hanged figure and writes the letter to one side so nobody guesses it twice.

The guessers win by naming every letter in the word, or by saying the whole word correctly at any point. The setter wins if the drawing is completed first. Then the roles swap, which is the part that keeps a group playing: everybody wants their turn to be the one nobody solves.

• The setter draws one dash per letter and, for a phrase, leaves a visible gap between words.
• Guessers call one letter at a time, in turn or by shouting, whichever the group prefers.
• A correct letter goes into every position where it occurs, not just the first one.
• A wrong letter costs one part of the drawing and is written to one side.
• A guesser may try the whole word at any time, and a wrong attempt costs a part.
• The word is revealed at the end, win or lose, so nobody can quietly change it.

What are the rules of hangman?

The core is fixed and short: one letter per guess, correct letters go in everywhere, wrong ones cost a body part, and the setter must reveal the word at the end. Everything else is a house rule, and almost every argument about hangman is really two people playing two different house rules without having said so.

Agree these four before the first round and the arguments disappear. Are proper nouns allowed, meaning names, places and brands. Are phrases allowed, or single words only. Does a wrong guess of the whole word cost a life, or end the game. And does repeating a letter that has already been guessed cost anything, which it usually should not, since it is a mistake rather than a move.

How many wrong guesses do you get in hangman?

Six is the classic answer, one for each part of the figure, with the gallows already drawn on the paper before play starts. Ten is the common generous version, where the base, post, beam and rope each cost a guess first. Groups playing with children often go further and add hands, feet and a face, which is a painless way to make the game winnable for a six-year-old without softening the words.

Pick the count to fit the words rather than the other way round. Six against ordinary words is a fair fight and six against the hardest hangman words is close to a formality for the setter. If your group is losing every round, add lives before you make the word list easier: difficulty you can dial mid-game is worth more than a list you have to rewrite.

How do you win at hangman? Guess letters in this order

By guessing letters in the order they actually appear in English, not in the order they feel common. Peter Norvig measured every letter across 3,563,505,777,820 letters of the Google Books corpus, and that measurement gives the guessing order below. E alone is one letter in every eight.

The order, top to bottom: E T A O I N S R H L D C U M F P G W Y B V K X J Q Z. Working down it will not win every game, but it will beat any strategy based on instinct, and it is exactly the strategy the Wolfram study used when it went looking for the hardest words to beat it.

Two things to take from the table. The top eight letters, E T A O I N S R, account for roughly two-thirds of everything written in English, which is why a word made only of those falls apart in four guesses. And the bottom four, K X J Q Z, are together under one percent, which is why a word carrying two of them is so hard that it needs announcing before the round starts.

What should you guess after the vowels?

Stop guessing letters and start reading the word. Once four or five letters are on the board, its shape is worth more than the frequency table, and this is where good guessers separate themselves from careful ones. Look at the endings first: a word finishing in _ N G is almost always ING, one finishing _ I O N takes a T, and a doubled blank near the end is usually LL, SS, EE or OO.

• Count the blanks against the vowels you already have: a long word with only one vowel showing is hiding a Y or a U.
• If no vowel has landed after all five, guess Y. Rhythm, nymph, crypt and myth all run on it.
• Q is always followed by U, so a Q on the board hands you a free letter.
• Two blanks side by side at the end of a short word are usually a double consonant, not two different letters.
• A three-letter word inside a phrase is nearly always the, and a two-letter one is of, to, in, it, is, at or on.

How do you choose a word as the setter?

Fairly, which is harder than it sounds, because the setter is the only person in the game who cannot lose by playing badly. The temptation is to pick something unbeatable, and an unbeatable word produces a round nobody enjoys, including the person who chose it.

The rule of thumb: pick a word everybody in the room knows, with one awkward letter in it, between five and nine letters long. That is precisely what the good hangman words list is built from. Then check the last blank, because a word where the final missing letter leaves two valid answers loses the guesser the game on a coin flip.

The other option is to stop choosing at all. If the word comes from a hangman word generator that hides it from everybody, the setter's job disappears entirely, nobody has to sit out, and the oldest argument in the game goes with it.

How do you play hangman with two players or a whole class?

With two, alternate strictly: one word each, then swap, and keep a running tally of who solved theirs in fewer wrong guesses rather than who solved theirs at all. Without a tally, two-player hangman ends when somebody gets bored, which is usually round four.

With a class or a party, put the board where everybody can see it and take guesses in a fixed order rather than by shouting, or the confident children will play the whole game. A projector works better than paper for a room of thirty, and giving the class ten lives instead of six keeps the slower thinkers involved, since a game that ends in ninety seconds teaches nobody anything.

Playing alone is the one version that needs help from outside, because you cannot hide a word from yourself. That is exactly what a generator is for: it draws the word, keeps it hidden, and lets you play the guessing half of the game on your own.

Where do you find words to play with?

The generator holds 710 across seventeen categories, and every one of them is published as a list you can read or print. The main hangman words page has 265 sorted by category, the good hangman words list has 105 built for a close game, and the hard hangman words page has 90 for a group that keeps winning.

For the words that beat almost everybody, with the research behind them, there are 40 hardest hangman words. For a party there are 90 funny hangman words, and for a completely different kind of round, the hangman phrases list has 85 sayings and titles.