Hangman

• Open with E, then A. Of the fifty-seven words in this list, E appears in thirty-two of them and A in twenty-nine, so each of those first two guesses is better than a coin toss. A guess is worth most when it is present in about half the words, because either answer tells you a great deal.
• Do not read a missed E as bad luck. Twenty-five of the fifty-seven words contain no E at all — pumpkin, quilt, robin and window among them. Missing on E is completely ordinary and costs you one of your six.
• After the vowels, work down in this order: N, then I, L and T, then O, then R, then U. N is in twenty-six of the words, I and L and T in twenty-three each, O in twenty-two, R in nineteen and U in sixteen. Guessing in rough frequency order wastes the fewest lives.
• If E, A and O have all missed, you are in a very small group. Only six words in the whole list contain none of those three: biscuit, picnic, quilt, muffin, pumpkin and tulip. At that point U or I is nearly certain, and you have effectively narrowed fifty-seven words to six.
• Use the endings. Six of the words end in -ow, five in -er, five in -et, five in -on, four in -le and four in -in. If you already have the last letter, guessing the one before it often opens up two or three positions at once instead of one.
• Expect doubled letters. Seventeen of the fifty-seven have one — pebble, balloon, kettle, slipper, muffin, seashell. If you are looking at two blanks side by side late in a word, a repeat of a letter you already have is a serious possibility.
• Stop guessing common letters once you can see the word. When enough is filled in that only one everyday noun fits the pattern, guess the letter that confirms it rather than the next most frequent letter on the list. Frequency is a way of starting, not a way of finishing.
• Read the counter, not the picture. The number at the top right is precise and instant; working out how many parts of the drawing have appeared is a slower way of learning the same thing.

Every letter is a real button. That means you can move between them with the Tab key and press one with Enter or the space bar, so the whole game can be played without touching a mouse. The buttons are set at the large size, about 48 pixels tall, with a clear 16-pixel gap between neighbours, so a slightly wide aim still lands on the letter you meant. There is nothing to drag anywhere in this game and nothing that needs a double-click.

Typing on your keyboard does not work. Pressing the E key does nothing at all — the game only listens for clicks and presses on the buttons on screen, so Tab and Enter are the keyboard route, not the letters themselves. The word is shown as letters and underscores at the page’s ordinary text size, and the underscores have a space either side of them, so a six-letter word looks wider than six characters.

Nothing is timed, nothing is scored and nothing is saved: there is no clock, no running total, no streak, and reloading the page simply gives you a new word. The drawing that builds up with each wrong guess is a small grey line figure on a gallows, drawn plainly. If you would rather not watch it fill in, the counter at the top right tells you exactly the same thing in numbers, and nothing else on the page depends on the picture. Your browser’s own zoom enlarges the letter buttons properly on a computer, since nothing in this game is pinned to the width of the window.

Nobody knows who invented Hangman. The earliest written trace of it is from 1894, in a collection of children’s games put together by Alice Gomme, where a version appears under the name Birds, Beasts and Fishes. That early form had no drawing at all: players simply scored on how many guesses the word had taken. The gallows came later — a description in a 1902 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer is the first known mention of the hanging picture, at which point the game acquired the fixed budget of mistakes that makes it a game rather than a quiz.

Very little has changed since, because very little needed to. A word, a row of blanks and a limit of six wrong guesses is enough structure for a real decision on every turn. What does change from one version to another is the word list, and it changes the game completely: obscure or technical words turn it into a lottery, while familiar ones turn it into something you can reason your way through. The list here is fifty-seven ordinary nouns of five to nine letters, with no proper names and no abbreviations, which is what makes the letter-frequency approach above worth using.

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