Food & Drink hangman
83 food and drink words, 6 wrong guesses, and a difficulty rating shown at the end of every round.
Chalking the board…
Playing this list
Food is the category where borrowed words do the damage. English kitchen vocabulary is stitched together from Italian, French, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic, and the spellings came along unchanged. Gnocchi, courgette and baklava all break the letter patterns a guesser expects from English.
That makes this a good category for a mixed group. The everyday half is easy enough for a child, and the borrowed half is genuinely difficult for an adult. Filter by score rather than by whether you have eaten the thing.
Watch for doubled letters. Broccoli, spaghetti and mozzarella all hide a double consonant, and a guesser who finds one L or one C will frequently forget to check whether there is a second.
The full list, with every clue and score, is on the food & drink 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 83 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 59% of a typical food and drink word, and the single most productive opening letter here is A, which appears 70 times. The least useful of the eight is T at 29 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, Z, V 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.
- dumpling · 8.5 · 8 letters · 25% common cover
- pumpkin · 8.4 · 7 letters · 29% common cover
- waffle · 7.7 · 6 letters · 33% common cover
- risotto · -1.3 · 7 letters · 100% common cover
- oregano · -0.6 · 7 letters · 86% common cover
- samosa · -0.3 · 6 letters · 83% common cover
Questions
How do you play food & drink 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?
83, drawn from the food & drink list. 46 rate easy, 25 medium and 12 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.