About Hangman Words
Hangman Words is a free hangman game and a set of word lists where every word carries a difficulty score worked out from its spelling.
Why the scores exist
Every hangman word list explains what makes a word hard. Rare letters, few vowels, not much repetition. The explanation is always about right, and then the list is sorted by somebody's judgement anyway, so words end up under Hard for sounding unusual rather than for playing hard.
We turned the explanation into arithmetic. Four measurements are taken from each word's spelling, combined into one number, and the whole formula is published so anybody can check it. That is the entire idea behind the site.
What the score does not know
It does not know whether you have met a word before, whether the category was announced, or how good the guesser is. It measures what the spelling gives away to a standard opening and nothing else.
That is a smaller claim than the lists we compete with. It is also the only one that can be verified, which is why the formula, the weights and the thresholds are all on one page rather than described vaguely in a paragraph.
What is here
A game that runs entirely in your browser, sixteen category word lists with a clue on every word, a solver that searches 344,000 words, a daily puzzle with a streak and a full archive, and a tool that turns any word into a shareable game.
Nothing needs an account. Your streak lives in your own browser, the words you create travel inside the link rather than through a server, and the word lists are printed into the page rather than loaded by script, so they can be read and copied without JavaScript.
How the lists were built
Every list is deduplicated on the way in. That sounds like a low bar until you check the biggest published lists in this niche and find the same word printed twice in both of them.
Each word carries a one-line clue, written to be useful in play rather than to pad the page. The clue is what appears when a player asks for a hint, and what sits beside the word on the list.