Hangman words, actually scored
1792 words across 24 categories, and every one carries a difficulty score worked out from its spelling rather than from somebody's opinion. Play a round below, or take the list.
Chalking the board…
Pick a category
All word listsEach card shows how many words are in the list and how they split across easy, medium and hard.
Creatures from every continent and every ocean.
85 words · 43/31/11 e/m/h
Dishes, ingredients and the things you cook them with.
83 words · 46/25/12 e/m/h
Nations from every continent, easy ones and awkward ones.
85 words · 48/29/8 e/m/h
Games, events, equipment and the words around them.
80 words · 27/37/16 e/m/h
Physics, chemistry, biology and everything above the atmosphere.
82 words · 48/30/4 e/m/h
Classroom objects, subjects and the rhythm of the school day.
82 words · 42/33/7 e/m/h
Trades, professions and what each one actually does.
84 words · 59/20/5 e/m/h
Landscape, weather, plants and the words for wild places.
82 words · 38/35/9 e/m/h
Hardware, software and the vocabulary that came with them.
82 words · 42/35/5 e/m/h
Airports, luggage, landmarks and everything in between.
83 words · 39/40/4 e/m/h
Instruments, notation, genres and how a piece is put together.
83 words · 46/25/12 e/m/h
How films are made, shot, cut and sold.
85 words · 49/29/7 e/m/h
Short, familiar words for players who are still learning to spell.
95 words · 41/37/17 e/m/h
Words that are enjoyable to say and awkward to guess.
86 words · 15/31/40 e/m/h
Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter and the rest of the calendar.
84 words · 39/39/6 e/m/h
Trees, stockings, carols and the whole of December.
81 words · 28/39/14 e/m/h
Pumpkins, costumes and everything that goes bump.
83 words · 26/35/22 e/m/h
All fifty, from Alabama to Wyoming.
50 words · 37/11/2 e/m/h
Anatomy from the skull to the sole.
74 words · 33/24/17 e/m/h
Planets, missions and everything past the atmosphere.
76 words · 42/29/5 e/m/h
Everything in the house, room by room.
83 words · 29/32/22 e/m/h
Every shade with a proper name, from crimson to taupe.
84 words · 40/37/7 e/m/h
Everything that moves people, on land, water or air.
85 words · 42/32/11 e/m/h
Multi-word idioms, where the gaps between words do half the work.
86 words · 82/4/0 e/m/h
Daily challenge
One word a day, same for everyone
A new word at midnight UTC, a streak that survives as long as you do, and a share grid that gives nothing away. Every past day stays playable in the archive.
Four ways in
Play
Full-screen game with every category, a clue button and your streak kept locally.
Daily
One word for everybody, a streak worth keeping, and a full replayable archive.
2 Player
Set a word for somebody else and send the link, or hand over the phone. No account either way.
Solve
Give it the pattern and the letters you have missed. It returns matches and the best letter to try next.
Why the scores are here
Every hangman word list on the internet sorts words into easy and hard by feel. The reasoning is always the same and always correct: hard words have rare letters, few vowels and not much repetition. Nobody then applies it.
So we did. Each word here is measured on four things a program can genuinely count in the spelling: distinct letters, rare letters, letters that people guess first, and the share of the word that is vowels. Those four numbers produce one score, the score sorts the list, and the whole formula is published on the methodology page so you can check any word against it.
It also settles arguments. Counted across a full dictionary, E is not the best opening guess for short words at all: for three, four and five letters A beats it, and E only takes over from six letters up. That table is on the best first guess page.
It changes which words you would pick. Platypus is a famous animal and a hard word. Rhinoceros is a longer, stranger animal and an easy one, because every letter in it is a letter people already guess. That difference is invisible on a hand-sorted list and obvious on a scored one.
The lists are also deduplicated, which sounds like a low bar until you check the biggest published lists in this niche and find the same word printed twice.
Common questions
What are the best words for hangman?
The hardest words combine rare letters, few vowels and many distinct letters, because a guesser opening with E, A and R gets nothing back. Every word on this site carries a score built from exactly those four measurements, so you can pick by difficulty rather than by how obscure a word sounds.
How is the difficulty score worked out?
Four things are counted in the spelling: how many distinct letters the word has, how many are rare, how many are among the letters people guess first, and what share of the word is vowels. The formula is published in full on the methodology page, so you can check any word yourself.
Is this hangman game free?
Yes. There is no signup, no account and no limit. The game runs in your browser, and your streak is stored on your own device rather than on a server.
How many wrong guesses do you get in hangman?
Six is the standard, which gives you a head, body, two arms and two legs. The kids list here uses ten instead, because more room for error keeps a young player in the game far better than easier words do.
Can I make a hangman game with my own words?
Yes. The create page turns any word or phrase into a game with a shareable link, so the other player never sees the answer. Nothing you type is sent to a server; the word is encoded into the link itself.