Word Games

Hangman

Guess letters before 6 wrong attempts. Solve a level to unlock the next.

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How to play

  1. Read the theme at the top — Animals, Foods, Countries, Sports, or Music.
  2. Tap a letter on the alphabet bar. Green = the letter is in the word. Gray = it's not.
  3. Each wrong letter draws another body part of the hangman figure.
  4. After 6 wrong guesses (head, body, two arms, two legs), the figure is complete and you lose.
  5. Win by revealing every letter of the word before that happens.

Strategy: the optimal letter order

Hangman is one of the few word games where there's a mathematically optimal opening sequence. Letter frequency in English is well-studied; the best universal opening order for words longer than 4 letters is:

  1. Vowels first — E (12.7%), A (8.2%), O (7.5%), I (7.0%), U (2.8%). E and A are in 99% of English words longer than 4 letters; you almost always want to spend your first 2 guesses on them.
  2. Then high-frequency consonants — T (9.1%), N (6.7%), S (6.3%), H (6.1%), R (6.0%), D (4.3%), L (4.0%).
  3. Then medium-frequency — C (2.8%), M (2.4%), W (2.4%), F (2.2%), G (2.0%), Y (2.0%), P (1.9%), B (1.5%).
  4. Avoid Q, X, Z, J early — combined they're under 0.5% of English. Wasting guesses on them is throwing away guesses.

Theme-specific shortcuts

  • Animals — many end in -Y (PUPPY, MONKEY) or contain a doubled letter (RABBIT, KITTEN, GIRAFFE). Guess Y early.
  • Foods — heavy on vowels (BANANA, AVOCADO, PINEAPPLE). E and O are extra valuable.
  • Countries — A is the most common letter (CANADA, PANAMA, BRAZIL, AUSTRALIA). Many end in -IA or -LAND.
  • Sports — short words, often compound (BASEBALL, FOOTBALL). T and B come up a lot.
  • Music — instrument names tend to be long with rare letters (XYLOPHONE, SAXOPHONE). The pay-off if X or Z hits is huge — a single hit reveals 1–2 letters in obvious positions.

A short history of Hangman

Hangman first appeared in print in Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland by Alice Bertha Gomme in 1894. She traces it to Victorian-era schoolyards under the name "Birds, Beasts, and Fishes." The drawing element — adding a body part for each wrong letter — comes from the same period as a teaching device, helping children visualize how many guesses they had left.

Hangman lived almost entirely on classroom whiteboards for a century. It hit television in the 1980s with Wheel of Fortune (which is essentially Hangman with a phrase, a wheel, and prizes), and made the leap to video games on early home computers — the very first software product Microsoft ever published was a Basic-language Hangman in 1979.

The "hangman" imagery has fallen out of favor in many classrooms; modern variants use a snowman that melts, a rocket that fails to launch, or just a ticking clock. We use the traditional figure here, but a kid-friendly visual swap is on the Wave 3 roadmap.

Why play here?

  • Same puzzle for everyone in your locale per date. Compare with friends — same theme, same word.
  • 5 themes rotate. You're not stuck guessing 4-letter generics; the themed pools keep it interesting.
  • Mobile-first. Touch alphabet bar, haptic feedback, fits a 320px iPhone SE.
  • Plays offline. Install once, play anywhere.
  • Multilingual coming. Phase 6 brings native themed lists — Spanish "comidas", German "tiere", French "pays" — not auto-translated word piles.

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