Animals hangman
85 animals words, 6 wrong guesses, and a difficulty rating shown at the end of every round.
Chalking the board…
Playing this list
Animal names are the friendliest category in hangman and the reason most people start here. Almost all of them end in a vowel or a common consonant cluster, and a guesser who opens with E, A and R will usually get a foothold in three guesses.
The trap is the long ones. Rhinoceros and chimpanzee look intimidating and are actually generous, because length means more letters revealed per correct guess. The genuinely hard entries here are the short ones with awkward letters: lynx, gecko, orca. Four or five letters and a rare consonant leaves you almost nothing to work with.
If you are choosing for someone else, pick by score rather than by how obscure the animal sounds. Platypus is a famous animal and a hard word. Antelope is a less famous animal and an easy one.
The full list, with every clue and score, is on the animals word list. If you want to set a word for somebody else instead, the create page turns any word into a shareable game.
What this list does to a guesser
Measured across all 85 words, this list sits almost exactly on the site average. The eight letters most people open with — E, T, A, O, I, N, S, R — uncover about 60% of a typical animals word, and the single most productive opening letter here is A, which appears 66 times. The least useful of the eight is I at 28 appearances, so spending an early guess on it in this category is usually wasted.
Every word here contains at least one of those eight letters, which is why this category rarely produces a round that collapses in the first three guesses.
Rare letters do turn up: K, W, J, Z and others appear across the list, and a word carrying one is usually the one that beats you. How the rating weighs that is set out on how difficulty is scored.
- lynx · 12.0 · 4 letters · 25% common cover
- chipmunk · 9.3 · 8 letters · 25% common cover
- owl · 9.0 · 3 letters · 33% common cover
- anteater · -2.1 · 8 letters · 100% common cover
- tortoise · -1.8 · 8 letters · 100% common cover
- manatee · -1.0 · 7 letters · 86% common cover
Questions
How do you play animals hangman?
Guess a letter. If it appears in the word it fills in every position it occupies; if not, another part of the figure is drawn. You get 6 wrong guesses. The clue button is there if you want it and costs nothing.
How many words are in this game?
85, drawn from the animals list. 43 rate easy, 31 medium and 11 hard, and the rating for each word is shown once the round ends.
Is it free, and do I need an account?
It is free and there is no account. The game runs in your browser and your streak is stored on your own device, so nothing is sent to a server.