How to pick a fair word for a child
By Aurangzeb Khan··4 min read
Adults setting words for children get it wrong in both directions. Too hard and the child never enters the round; too easy and they know they have been handed it, which is worse. The useful question is narrower than difficulty: can a reasonable opening put a letter on the board?
The two-guess test
Before you set a word, ask what happens if the child guesses A and then E. If at least one of them lands, the word is fair. If neither does, you have set a word that begins with four wasted guesses, and a child with four limbs drawn and an empty board has already stopped playing.
That test rules out most of the words adults reach for when they want to be clever, and it keeps almost everything a child would actually enjoy.
Look for a repeated letter
A word with a doubled or repeated letter is the kindest thing you can set, because one correct guess fills two blanks and the board visibly moves. BALLOON, BUTTER, RABBIT, SUCCESS — these are low-scoring words on this site precisely because they give so much away, and giving things away is the point when the guesser is seven.
Watch what happens in the room: the moment two blanks fill at once, the child leans in. One blank filling is progress; two is a discovery.
Length is not the lever you think
Short words feel kind and often are not. Four letters with no repeats gives a child four chances and no pattern; eight letters with two Es and an O gives them a shape to reason about. If you want to make a round easier, do not shorten the word — pick one with more vowels and more repetition.
This is the same reason DUCK outscores RHINOCEROS on the difficulty scale here, and it is worth showing a child once. Children find it genuinely funny, and it teaches them something about the game that most adults never work out.
Give more guesses instead of easier words
Ten wrong guesses rather than six changes a child's experience more than any word choice. It keeps the round alive long enough for the board to fill, and a filled board is where the thinking happens.
It also lets you set a slightly harder word without the round collapsing, which is how a child's vocabulary actually grows during the game rather than before it.
Say the category
Always. A child without a category is working alphabetically through letters they can remember. A child who has been told it is an animal is thinking about animals, and thinking about animals is the part worth having.
It costs nothing in difficulty. If anything it lets you set a harder word, because the category does the work the extra guesses would have done.
What to do when the round is clearly lost
Give a letter rather than finish the drawing. Place a free one in the hardest position, say nothing about it, and let the round continue.
Adults resist this because it feels like cheating, and the resistance is misplaced: the purpose of the round is for a child to arrive at a word, not for the rules to be enforced. A child who gets there with help remembers the word. A child who watches the gallows complete remembers the gallows.
If you are doing it often, the words are too hard rather than the child too slow, and the fix is upstream.
Words to avoid
Anything with a silent letter, until they are older. A child who knows the word KNIFE and has never seen it written will guess N, be told it is there, and then be unable to place it — a confusing experience that teaches the wrong thing.
Proper nouns, because the spelling follows no rule and a wrong guess carries no information.
And the word you had to think about. If choosing it took you more than a few seconds, it is probably a word you are proud of rather than one the child can reach.
Let the child set one back
A child choosing a word for an adult is doing the harder half of the game. They have to think about what you know, which is a genuinely difficult piece of perspective-taking, and they usually overshoot wildly in their first few attempts.
Take the unfair word without complaint and lose the round. The lesson lands better from losing than from a rule, and the next word they set will be noticeably better judged.
A quick way to do this with no preparation
Open the kids list on this site and take anything rated easy. Every word on it is one a young child has already met, the rating beside it is computed rather than assumed, and the clue is written to be read aloud when the round stalls.
Seventeen of the words on that list rate hard, which the page says plainly. Those are for a confident nine-year-old, not for a class of six-year-olds, and the difference is visible before you set the word rather than after.