Halloween hangman
83 Halloween words, 6 wrong guesses, and a difficulty rating shown at the end of every round.
Chalking the board…
Playing this list
Halloween has the best vocabulary of any seasonal list, because the words were chosen over centuries to sound unsettling. Macabre, spectre and poltergeist all carry letter patterns that ordinary English does not.
That makes this the hardest of the seasonal categories by a clear margin. If you are playing with young children, filter to easy and leave the longer atmosphere words for the adults.
The trap here is the short ones. Bats, owl and hood look harmless and score badly for the guesser, because a standard opening of vowels barely touches them.
The full list, with every clue and score, is on the halloween 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 runs 0.9 points harder than the site average. The eight letters most people open with — E, T, A, O, I, N, S, R — uncover about 57% of a typical Halloween word, and the single most productive opening letter here is E, which appears 59 times. The least useful of the eight is N at 29 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 — mummy. 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: K, W, V, Z 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.
- mummy · 10.2 · 5 letters · 0% common cover
- howl · 10.0 · 4 letters · 25% common cover
- lurk · 10.0 · 4 letters · 25% common cover
- eerie · -4.6 · 5 letters · 100% common cover
- treat · -0.8 · 5 letters · 100% common cover
- sinister · -0.8 · 8 letters · 100% common cover
Questions
How do you play halloween 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 halloween list. 26 rate easy, 35 medium and 22 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.