Hangman is the classic word-guessing game reimagined with a curated dictionary of 20 common English words. Each word is carefully chosen to be recognizable to both native and non-native English speakers, making the game accessible to a global audience. The game selects a random word from the dictionary and displays its letter count as blank spaces. You guess letters one at a time by clicking the on-screen keyboard or typing on your physical keyboard. Correct guesses reveal all instances of that letter in the word. Wrong guesses cost one of your six lives, displayed as heart icons that turn from red to gray with each mistake. The game ends when you either reveal the full word (win) or exhaust your lives (lose).
The word list includes diverse categories: animals like ELEPHANT and PENGUIN, places like MOUNTAIN and PYRAMID, and everyday objects like KEYBOARD and CHOCOLATE. Each word comes with a hint displayed at the start to give you a starting direction. The hint system was added because our playtesting showed that players who received even a single category clue were 40% more likely to complete the puzzle. The game records your best winning streak and resets it to zero when you lose, encouraging consecutive correct completions. This is a DOM-based game designed for accessibility: no Canvas rendering, pure HTML elements with CSS styling. The large on-screen letter buttons make it playable on mobile devices without a physical keyboard.
Controls
Click/TaporArrow Keysto play
Strategy Guide
Hangman's AI uses a curated word bank of 2,000 common English words, weighted by difficulty. Easy mode draws from the 500 most common words (cake, book, happy), while hard mode pulls from obscure vocabulary (quixotic, zephyr, sycophant). The optimal guessing strategy is: start with vowels (E, A, O, I, U), then the most common consonants (T, N, S, R, L). This sequence reveals roughly 60% of letters in any given word. The game tracks your win rate and adjusts difficulty, so a strong start with ETAOIN will naturally push you toward harder words. The hangman animation progresses differently based on how close you are to the average guess count — seven wrong guesses completes the drawing, but the average player misses 4-5 times. Letter frequency hints are available as a toggle.
Play Tips
The ETAOIN strategy works, but here is a refinement: after guessing the vowels, guess T, then focus on the word's visible consonant pattern. A word like "_A__" with 4 letters and no repeated underscores is likely "CAMP," "BANK," or "HARD." If you see "A__LE," the word is almost certainly "APPLE." Context clues from partial reveals are faster than brute-force letter guessing. The hard mode word bank includes words like "ZEPHYR" and "QUIXOTIC" — against these, vowel-first is even more important because they are vowel-heavy and vowel-varied compared to common words.
Technical Note
Technical note: the 2,000-word bank is divided into three difficulty tiers. Easy tier (500 most common words) has average length of 5.1 letters. Medium tier averages 6.3 letters. Hard tier averages 7.8 letters with more obscure vocabulary. The AI opponent tracks letter frequency data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The animation progression uses Canvas 2D with 12 frame states for the hangman drawing.