Hangman solver
Type what you can see and what you have already got wrong. Along with the words still possible, this works out which letter to try next, which is the part that actually saves you a life. It is not always the most common letter, and that surprises people.
- Half
- The share of candidates a perfect guess should appear in
- 171,280
- Words searched, from two letters up to fifteen
- Common first
- Hangman is played with words people know, so those rank highest
Guess the letter that splits the field
Almost all hangman advice is some version of "start with the vowels, then try R, S, T, L and N". That is fine for the first guess and misleading after it.
Once you know the length and have a letter or two, you are no longer playing against English in general. You are playing against a specific list of remaining candidates, and the useful question is which letter divides that list most evenly. A letter in all of them teaches you nothing when it appears. A letter in one of them almost always comes back wrong.
The best guess is the one you are least able to predict the answer to.
So the suggestions here are ranked by closeness to half the field rather than by raw frequency, and they update every time you add a wrong letter. Watching that list reorder is the fastest way to internalise the idea.
Enter the length first
Even with no letters revealed, the number of blanks alone eliminates most of the dictionary. Four letters leaves 3,903 candidates; eight leaves 28,506.
Add every wrong guess
This is the step people skip and it is worth more than the revealed letters. Five ruled-out letters will usually cut a candidate list by more than ninety percent.
Guess from the suggestions, not from habit
Then update the pattern and look again. The recommended letter often changes completely after one reveal, which is the whole reason to recalculate rather than working from a memorised order.
Choosing a word nobody will guess
Setting a hard hangman word is a different skill and most people do it badly. Long, obscure words feel difficult and usually are not, because length gives your opponent more positions to reveal and more structure to reason from.
Short beats long
Three and four letter words are far crueller. There is almost no pattern to exploit, and each wrong guess costs a life without narrowing much. JAZZ, LYNX and FUZZ are more effective than anything twelve letters long.
Avoid the common letters entirely
A word with no E, no A, no R, S, T, L or N forces your opponent to burn guesses discovering that. Words built from the awkward end of the alphabet do this naturally.
Repeat a rare letter
Doubling an unusual letter is the single most effective trick. Once your opponent finally guesses the Z in FUZZY they get two positions at once, but by then they have usually spent most of their lives finding it.
Words with no vowels at all are the extreme version of this, and they are all perfectly legal.
Related tools
- Crossword pattern, no wrong letters
- Wordle adds misplaced letters
- Unscrambler from a set of letters
- Word lists browse by length
The crossword solver is the same pattern search without the ruled-out letters, if that is all you need.
About hangman
How do I enter the word?
One character per position. Type the letters you have already revealed and a question mark for every blank. If the word is seven letters with an E in position three, that is ??E????.
Then add every letter you have guessed wrong in the second field. Those are what really narrow the list, often more than the revealed letters do.
Why does it suggest a letter that is not the most common?
Because the most common letter is usually the least informative. If E appears in every one of your remaining candidates, guessing it reveals a position but eliminates nothing, and you are no closer to the answer.
The suggestions here are ranked by how close a letter comes to appearing in half the candidates. That is the guess that halves the problem whichever way it goes, which is what you actually want when you have limited lives.
Is E really the best first guess?
For a blank word with no information at all, a common vowel is a reasonable opening, and E is the most frequent letter in English. But it stops being the right answer almost immediately.
Once you know the length and have one or two positions, the letter frequencies of that specific set of candidates matter far more than the frequencies of English as a whole. That is exactly what this calculates, and it is why the suggestions change as you fill the pattern in.
Does word length help?
Enormously, and people underuse it. There are only 96 two-letter words and nearly thirty thousand at eight letters, so a short word is far more constrained. If the answer is three or four letters you can often reason it out from one revealed position and two wrong guesses.
Nothing matches my pattern
Two usual causes. Check the number of question marks matches the number of blanks exactly, since an off-by-one is the most common mistake here.
Otherwise the answer is probably a proper noun, a phrase or a hyphenated word, none of which are in a word-game dictionary. Plenty of hangman games use film titles and place names, and no word list will find those.