Hangman

The rules and the words

You get six wrong guesses, one per body part in the classic order: head, torso, both arms, both legs. Correct letters cost nothing and fill in every position where they appear at once. The word pool is 229 common English nouns, and the length mix is worth knowing before you guess: 154 six-letter words, 61 seven-letter, 13 eight-letter, and a single nine-letter word. So the moment the blanks appear, you already know something. A six-letter word is the default case, and a long word is a small event.

Wins build a streak, losses reset it to zero, and your best streak is saved on your device. Guess by tapping the on-screen keyboard or just typing; used letters gray out so you cannot burn a guess repeating yourself, and Enter deals the next word after a game ends.

Guessing like you mean it

Open with E, then A, R, O, T, N, roughly the frequency order of English, and you will usually have two or three hits inside your first four guesses. But raw frequency is only the opening book. The pool here is concrete household, nature, and school vocabulary, which shapes the middle game: these are words like BASKET, BRIDGE, and CAMERA, not legal jargon, so once you have a skeleton, think in terms of ordinary objects you could point at.

The tip that wins streaks: the pattern of revealed letters matters more than the count. A word ending in _ER or showing E in the second and fifth slots narrows a 229-word pool brutally fast, and with six-letter words dominating, common endings like -ER, -LE, and -ON are high-value tests. Also respect the danger word shapes: a word showing no E, A, or O after three guesses is vowel-poor, so spend a guess on U and I early rather than doubling down on consonants. Six wrong guesses sounds generous until you meet a word whose vowels you already own and whose consonants are B, T, and two Ts you cannot distinguish from the blanks.

Streaks in context

With a fair pool of common words and six lives, a careful player wins most individual games; the streak is where difficulty actually lives, because it demands consistency rather than one good solve. Streaks in the single digits are normal, and double digits mean you have stopped making frequency mistakes and started reading word shapes. One caveat when comparing: words are drawn randomly with replacement, so a long session will occasionally re-deal a word you have seen. Familiar words are the streak's little gifts; take them without guilt.

Design notes

The word list deliberately contains no obscure dictionary bait, no hyphens, and no proper nouns, because a hangman loss should feel like your mistake rather than the curator's ambush. The figure draws one part per miss so the stakes are always visible, and a loss reveals the word, which stings exactly as intended. There is no timer, no hint system, and no scoring beyond the streak. Everything, including your best streak, lives in your browser's local storage, and nothing is transmitted anywhere. The game also does not adapt difficulty; every word is drawn from the same flat pool, so a hard game is luck, not punishment.