Hangman

Overview

Hangman is the classic letter-guessing word game. A target word is chosen at random from a category (animals, foods, places, sports, and a general bank), shown only as underscores, and your job is to guess the letters in it before you run out of incorrect guesses. Each wrong letter adds a piece to the stylised gallows; six wrong guesses ends the round.

This implementation cycles through five categories so you can mix vocabulary, and the displayed wrong-letter list helps you avoid duplicates. There's no real hanging here — the gallows is purely the count of mistakes — so the game leans on word patterns and letter frequency just like the pen-and-paper version.

How it works

When a new round starts, a word is sampled uniformly from the chosen category's bank. The display reveals the word's length as underscores and pre-fills any non-letter characters such as spaces or hyphens so they don't count as guesses.

Each letter guess scans the word for matches. If at least one position contains the guessed letter, every matching position is revealed at once and no wrong-guess counter increments. A miss appends the letter to the wrong-list and increments the counter; reaching six misses ends the round. Repeated guesses of the same letter don't increment the counter but also don't help, so the optimal play is to think before each guess.

Examples

• Word BANANA is shown as _ _ _ _ _ _. Guessing A reveals positions 2, 4, and 6: _ A _ A _ A.
• A high-frequency opening sequence in English is E, A, R, I, O, T, N, S — covering the most common letters first.
• A short word like JAZZ is harder than its length suggests because uncommon letters dominate.
• The longest legitimate Hangman words tend to come from a curated category list rather than random English.

FAQ

How many wrong guesses do I get?
Six, matching the traditional six-piece gallows (head, body, two arms, two legs).

Can I guess the whole word at once?
This version requires letter-by-letter guesses. Some variants allow a single full-word guess at the cost of all remaining tries.

Are the categories balanced for difficulty?
Roughly. Animals and foods skew shorter; places and sports include longer compound words.

Why was my correct guess not credited as a "wrong" letter list?
Correct letters are revealed in the word; incorrect ones go in the wrong-list. The two columns don't overlap.

Can I change the language?
The bank is English-only in this build. A custom category list can be added by editing the source.

Try Hangman