How to play Hangman

Guess the hidden word one letter at a time — six wrong guesses and the round is over.

Hangman is a word-guessing game. A word is hidden, you are told how many letters it has and which category it comes from, and you guess one letter at a time.

The round

The hidden word appears as blank slots, one per letter. The category — Animals, Countries, Food, Space, Sports or Music — is shown alongside it, and it is your only clue about the content of the word.

Guess a letter. If it appears anywhere in the word, every matching slot fills at once, and it costs you nothing. If it does not appear, it counts as a miss.

Six misses ends the round and the answer is revealed. Reveal the whole word before that and you win.

Each letter can only be guessed once, so there is no way to waste a turn by repeating yourself.

The streak

Winning rounds in a row builds a streak that is kept between visits. A single loss resets it to zero.

That is what stops the game being a pure coin flip on hard words: with a streak running, a risky guess costs something real, and the correct play shifts towards the safe letters.

Which letters to guess, and in what order

The useful thing to know is that English letter frequency is not close to uniform.

E is by far the most common letter, then roughly T, A, O, I, N, S, H and R. Those nine letters make up around seventy per cent of written English, and opening with the vowels among them — E, A, O, I — tells you the shape of the word for very little risk.

After the vowels, the high-value consonants are T, N, S, R and L. Between them they cover most word skeletons.

The letters to avoid early are J, Q, X, Z and V. They are rare enough that a miss is much more likely than a hit, and a miss costs a sixth of your round.

Using the shape

Once a few letters land, stop guessing by frequency and start guessing by pattern.

A blank ending in _ I N G is almost certainly ING. A doubled slot near the end is often LL, SS, EE or OO. A word beginning with a consonant followed by a blank and then a consonant usually has a vowel in the middle, and if E, A and O are already out then it is I or U.

Use the category too. In Countries, a word ending in _ _ N D is likely to be LAND. In Space, a word of six letters starting with S is worth guessing around SATURN before SILVER.

Why the last guess is the hardest

Near the end of a round the correct play changes. With one miss left and two plausible words fitting the pattern, the frequency table stops helping — you are choosing between two specific answers, and the better guess is the letter that distinguishes them rather than the letter that is more common overall.

Controls

Tap letters on the on-screen keyboard, or type them on a physical keyboard. Press Enter after a round to start the next word.

Strategy tips

Open with the vowels: E, then A, O and I. They shape the word for you and they are the most likely letters to be in it.
Follow with T, N, S, R and L. Those five cover most consonant skeletons in English, and between them and the vowels you will usually have the word's outline.
Avoid J, Q, X, Z and V until you are forced into them. A miss costs a sixth of your round and these letters usually miss.
Read the category before your first guess, not after your third. It changes the odds enormously — Countries and Music have very different letter profiles.
Once you have a pattern, stop playing the frequencies. A trailing _ I N G, a doubled slot, or a leading TH is worth far more than the next letter on the frequency list.
Count the slots. Short words are more dangerous than long ones, because there is less pattern to work with and more words that fit.
With a streak running, take the safe letter. A streak turns a fifty-fifty guess into a real cost, and the frequency-safe letter is the one that protects it.
On the last miss, guess the letter that separates the candidates rather than the most common one. At that point you are choosing between specific words, not sampling the language.