Hangman

The classroom classic, one hand on a phone. A hidden English word shows only as blank slots; tap letters to guess it. Every letter that is in the word turns up in all its places at once, and every letter that is not adds another stroke to the gallows. Six wrong guesses finish the drawing and end your run, so spend them carefully.

How to play

The word is English and four to nine letters long. The row of underscores tells you exactly how long it is — that is your first and most useful clue.

Tap any letter on the keyboard. If the word contains it, every position holding that letter opens at once, so a letter that appears twice costs you only one guess. If the word does not contain it, one more piece of the hanged man goes up: rope and head, then body, then each arm, then each leg. The dots above the word count how many wrong letters you have left.

Open every letter of the word and your streak goes up by one, with a new word dealt immediately. Miss six times and the drawing is finished, the answer is revealed, and the streak drops to zero — that is the moment to save it to the Hall of Fame if it was a good run. A physical keyboard works too if you are on a desktop.

Tips & strategy

Vowels first, but not all of them. Nearly every English word has at least one of E, A, O, I, and E alone shows up in roughly one word in two, so opening with E then A is almost free information. Sweeping all five vowels blindly is the classic beginner trap, though: a word like RHYTHM or a tight one like TRUCK will eat three of your six lives before you have learned anything useful.

After a vowel or two, switch to the heavyweight consonants. R, S, T, N, L and C carry most of the weight in ordinary English, and each of them appears in far more words than the vowels U or Y do. If two or three slots are still blank in the middle of a longer word, R and N are usually the safest next taps.

Read the shape, not just the letters. The blank pattern plus the word length narrows things fast: a nine-letter word with two open slots at the end is very likely to finish in -ION, -ENT, -ANCE or -MENT, and an E in second-to-last position with one blank after it is nearly always a final R or D. Short four-letter words are the dangerous ones — there is almost no shape to read, so guess the frequent letters and expect to lose one now and then.

Remember that a letter costs the same whether it appears once or three times. Words with a doubled letter feel harder but are actually generous: hitting the L in BALLOON or the S in ADDRESS opens two slots for one guess. When you are down to one or two lives and can nearly see the answer, count the remaining blanks before you tap — one careless letter thrown at a word you already half-know is how most streaks end.