Hangman — the free browser version of the classic word guessing game

A word is hidden behind a row of blanks. Pick a letter: if it is in the word, every copy of it is revealed; if it is not, you have used one of your six wrong guesses. Solve the word and you keep going — but the next word is a letter longer, so a streak that starts on five-letter words is on eight-letter ones by the fourth. Your score is how many you solved in a row before six wrong guesses caught up with you.

The word list here is deliberately ordinary English — no proper nouns, no obscurities you could not reasonably be expected to know — because a hangman word you have never seen is not a puzzle, it is a coin toss. Free, no download, and it plays with the on-screen keys on a phone or your real keyboard on a desktop.

How to play

• Tap a letter (or press it on a keyboard) to guess it.
• A correct letter reveals every copy of itself. A wrong one costs one of your six lives.
• Solving a word does not end the run — it deals a longer one and your lives reset.
• Six wrong guesses on any single word ends the run. Your score is words solved in a row.

The letters to actually open with (it isn't E)

Everyone opens with E, and it is a genuinely poor first guess. E is the most common letter in English, which sounds like the argument for guessing it — but frequency is not the same as information. A letter that appears in most words barely narrows down which word you are looking at; you have spent a turn to learn something you could have assumed. The letters worth spending a guess on are the ones that split the field roughly in half.

In practice that makes R, S, T, L and N the strongest openers on short words — the same five the Wheel of Fortune final round hands out for free, and not by coincidence. They are common enough to hit often, but uncommon enough that missing one genuinely rules out a large slice of the dictionary. Once you have two or three of those placed, the word's shape starts doing the work for you.

Then switch strategies entirely: stop guessing letters and start guessing the word. Once you can see _ R _ _ K, you are not choosing between 26 letters, you are choosing between BRICK, BREAK, TRUCK, TRICK and a couple of others — and the right move is to pick the letter that separates those candidates, not the most common letter overall. That is also why the ending matters more than the start: an -ING or a plural -S is worth two guesses of information for the price of one, and hitting a G early tells you far more than hitting an E ever will.

More games

More word games: Daily Word, Word Scramble, or Word Search. Or browse all games.