Hangman

Hangman — how to play and tips

The classic word-guessing game. A word is hidden behind blanks — guess one letter at a time to reveal it. Every wrong guess adds another piece to the drawing, and six mistakes ends the round. Solve it before that and your streak grows. There's no timer and no penalty for thinking, so each round is exactly as fast or as careful as you want it to be.

How to play

Tap letters on the on-screen keyboard, or just type on a real keyboard — every letter key is read as a guess, so there's no need to click into a text box first. Correct letters turn green and fill in every position where they appear in the word; wrong ones grey out on the keyboard and cost you a life, shown as a piece added to the gallows drawing. Letters you've already tried are disabled and can't be clicked again, so a slip of the thumb can't waste a life on a repeat guess. The lives counter at the top always shows exactly how many misses you have left, so you're never guessing blind about how much room for error remains.

Every word has a category

Blind hangman on a completely unknown word is really just an exercise in guessing common letters in frequency order. Showing the category — Animal, Music, Nature, Places, Transport, Technology, Food, Sport, Jobs or Science — turns it back into an actual guessing game, giving you enough to reason from without handing you the answer. A word tagged Animal narrows things enormously compared to a totally open guess, and a word tagged Technology steers you away from wasting early guesses on letters that are common in everyday English but rare in that word list. The category line sits right above the blanks for the whole round, so it's always there to lean on if you get stuck partway through.

Repeated letters

Guessing a letter reveals all of its positions at once, which is the standard rule. It's also why a word like GYMNASTICS or SUCCESS is far easier than its length suggests — a single lucky letter can open up several slots in one go, and a long word with a repeated vowel or common consonant can suddenly look almost solved after just two or three guesses. This is worth remembering when you're deciding what to guess next: a letter you suspect appears twice is worth more than a letter you're equally unsure about but expect to appear once, because it buys you more information and more revealed letters for the same one life at risk.

Strategy

Open with vowels, but not all of them: E, A and O cover most words, while U and Y are usually better saved for later once the shape of the word gives you a better idea whether they're likely. Then go after the high-frequency consonants — R, S, T, L, N — before reaching for rarer letters like Q, X or Z, which only pay off if the category makes them likely. Once you have a few letters revealed, stop guessing by pure frequency and start reading the shape of the word instead; the category plus a couple of well-placed letters is usually enough to see the answer outright, and guessing the pattern beats grinding through the rest of the alphabet one letter at a time. Longer words in this game's lists, like RHINOCEROS or PHOTOGRAPHER, tend to be more forgiving than short ones because there's more shape to read once a handful of letters land — a five-letter word gives you far less to work with per guess.

Streaks

Solving a word extends your streak by one and adds it to your running solved count; losing a round resets the streak to zero, though your total solved count keeps climbing regardless. Your longest streak ever is saved on your device and shown on the start screen, so the real game beyond any single round is seeing how many words you can chain together without a single loss. Because the word list draws from a genuinely large pool spanning ten categories, you won't see the same handful of words on repeat — every restart shuffles a fresh bag of words so the whole set gets used before anything repeats.

Playing on mobile and desktop

On a touchscreen, tap letters directly on the on-screen keyboard laid out in the familiar QWERTY rows. On a computer, your physical keyboard works the same way without needing to click anything first — just start typing letters once a round begins. Sound effects mark a correct guess, a miss, a solve and a loss differently, and can be muted with the speaker icon if you'd rather play in silence. Because the gallows drawing is vector art rather than a photograph, it stays sharp on any screen size, from a small phone to a wide desktop monitor.