Playing hangman with phrases: the rules worth agreeing first
By Aurangzeb Khan··4 min read
Phrases make hangman better and they introduce four arguments. Each one is easy to settle and impossible to settle halfway through a round, so settle them first.
Show the spaces
Before the first guess, draw the blanks with the gaps in. The guesser should be able to see that they are facing three words of four, two and six letters.
Hiding the gaps produces a puzzle that is not harder but arbitrary — the guesser cannot reason about word boundaries, which is most of what makes a phrase guessable at all. Every phrase on this site is shown with its spaces from the start.
Decide what punctuation does
The cleanest rule is to strip it: no apostrophes, no hyphens, no full stops. CAUGHT RED HANDED rather than caught red-handed, DEVILS ADVOCATE rather than devil's advocate. It keeps the game to letters, which is what the game is.
The alternative — showing punctuation in place, unguessed — also works and gives the guesser more. What does not work is leaving it undeclared, because an apostrophe appearing mid-round changes the shape of the answer after guesses have been spent on it.
Agree whether a guess fills every word
If the phrase contains THE twice and the guesser says T, does one T appear or both? Both, always — that is the same rule as a repeated letter in a single word, and the alternative turns the game into bookkeeping.
Worth saying aloud anyway, because about half of players assume the other thing.
Give more wrong guesses
A phrase has more positions than a word and therefore more opportunities for a guess to land, which sounds like it makes things easier. It does for the first few guesses and then stops: the long tail of a phrase is often one awkward word that the rest of the letters do not help with.
Eight or ten wrong guesses suits phrases better than six. The round is longer by nature and six ends it in the middle.
Why the difficulty scores look odd on phrases
This site rates every word with one formula, and on the phrases list that formula produces 81 easy, 5 medium and 0 hard out of 86. There is no hard tier worth speaking of, and that is a limitation rather than a finding.
The formula measures how much a word's spelling gives away to a standard opening: how many letters, how many distinct, how rare they are, how much repetition there is. All of that assumes one unbroken run of letters.
A phrase breaks the assumption. The spaces are handed over for free before anyone guesses, and they carry an enormous amount of information — word lengths, often word count, sometimes the grammatical shape. The formula cannot see any of it, so it scores a phrase as though it were one long word with lots of repetition, which comes out easy almost every time.
Rather than invent a separate scale to fill the hard bucket, the page says this. An empty tier that is honestly empty is better than a tier populated to look complete.
Where phrases beat single words
They hold a room better. A phrase gives several people something to contribute — one person recognises a word, another sees the rhythm, a third knows the saying — where a single word tends to be solved by whoever gets there first.
They also fail more interestingly. A guesser who has four of five words and cannot reach the fifth is in a position that single-word hangman almost never produces, and it is the position people describe afterwards.
And they are kinder to weak spellers, because a reader who recognises the phrase can work backwards to the spelling rather than forwards from it.
What makes a phrase genuinely hard
One uncommon word among common ones. A phrase where four words fall out of the opening and the fifth is something like QUALM leaves a guesser with most of the board filled and no way to finish, which is the most frustrating and most memorable shape a round can take.
Also: phrases whose words are all short. Three three-letter words give far less structural information than one nine-letter word, even though the letter count is identical.
Setting your own
Pick phrases people complete without thinking. The test is whether somebody can finish it when you say the first half aloud — if they can, the phrase has the redundancy that makes a round satisfying rather than arbitrary.
Avoid anything with a variable form. Phrases that are said three different ways produce an argument at the end of the round about whether the answer was right, which is the one outcome worth designing against.
A note on idioms with learners
Idioms are a poor fit for anyone still learning English, because a guesser who does not already have the phrase cannot use revealed letters to reason towards it. The structure that helps a native speaker is invisible to them. Keep phrases for groups who know them.