Colours hangman
84 colours words, 6 wrong guesses, and a difficulty rating shown at the end of every round.
Chalking the board…
Playing this list
Colour names are borrowed from everywhere: minerals, flowers, wines, animals and places. Chartreuse, vermilion and periwinkle all keep the spelling of wherever they came from, which is why this list is harder than it sounds.
That makes it a good category for a wide age range. The basic shades are easy enough for a child and the pigment names are genuinely difficult for an adult, so one list serves both ends of the table.
Beware the ones that are also objects. Salmon, peach, jade and rust are colours here, and a guesser who has worked out the category will still argue about it.
The full list, with every clue and score, is on the colours 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 84 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 62% of a typical colours word, and the single most productive opening letter here is E, which appears 64 times. The least useful of the eight is S at 27 appearances, so spending an early guess on it in this category is usually wasted.
One word in this list contain none of those eight letters at all — plum. Those are the rounds that end early, because a standard opening draws the whole figure before a single letter lands.
Rare letters do turn up: V, K, W, J 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.
- plum · 11.0 · 4 letters · 0% common cover
- blush · 9.4 · 5 letters · 20% common cover
- gold · 8.5 · 4 letters · 25% common cover
- rose · -1.0 · 4 letters · 100% common cover
- saturation · -0.6 · 10 letters · 90% common cover
- tangerine · -0.1 · 9 letters · 89% common cover
Questions
How do you play colours 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?
84, drawn from the colours list. 40 rate easy, 37 medium and 7 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.