Music hangman
83 music words, 6 wrong guesses, and a difficulty rating shown at the end of every round.
Chalking the board…
Playing this list
Music has the richest borrowed vocabulary of any category here, almost all of it Italian. Crescendo, staccato and legato behave nothing like English words, and a guesser who tries the usual openers gets very little back.
The instrument names are the opposite. Guitar, piano and violin are among the easiest words on the whole site, because everybody knows the spelling and the letters are all common.
That split makes this the best category for setting a difficulty deliberately. Filter to easy for the instruments and to hard for the notation, and you get two completely different games from one list.
The full list, with every clue and score, is on the music 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 60% of a typical music word, and the single most productive opening letter here is O, which appears 62 times. The least useful of the eight is I at 30 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: V, Z, K, 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.
- jazz · 11.8 · 4 letters · 25% common cover
- cymbal · 10.0 · 6 letters · 17% common cover
- folk · 10.0 · 4 letters · 25% common cover
- notation · -2.1 · 8 letters · 100% common cover
- sonata · -1.5 · 6 letters · 100% common cover
- oboe · -1.3 · 4 letters · 75% common cover
Questions
How do you play music 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 music 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.