Sports hangman
80 sports words, 6 wrong guesses, and a difficulty rating shown at the end of every round.
Chalking the board…
Playing this list
Sports vocabulary is unusually long. Basketball, gymnastics and championship all run past ten letters, and long words are more forgiving than they look: every correct guess uncovers more of the board.
The difficulty here sits in the short ones. Golf, darts and judo give a guesser almost nothing, and judo hides a J that most people never try. If you want a quick brutal round, this is where to find it.
This category also has more compound words than any other. Once a guesser sees -ball or -board at the end, they can often finish the whole word from two or three letters, so compounds play faster than their length suggests.
The full list, with every clue and score, is on the sports 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 80 words, this list runs 0.7 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 sports word, and the single most productive opening letter here is I, which appears 53 times. The least useful of the eight is R at 35 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, V, 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.
- rugby · 9.4 · 5 letters · 20% common cover
- cycling · 8.6 · 7 letters · 29% common cover
- golf · 8.5 · 4 letters · 25% common cover
- referee · -1.9 · 7 letters · 86% common cover
- tennis · -0.2 · 6 letters · 100% common cover
- training · 0.5 · 8 letters · 88% common cover
Questions
How do you play sports 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?
80, drawn from the sports list. 27 rate easy, 37 medium and 16 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.