Hangman solver
Give it the pattern you can see and the letters that have already failed. It returns every word that fits, out of 344,000, and tells you which letter to try next and why.
Letters you already have
Leave a box empty for a position you have not filled in yet.
Letters you guessed and missed
How to use it mid-game
Set the number of letters to the number of blanks in front of you. Type the letters you have already revealed into the positions they occupy, and leave the rest empty. Then mark every letter you have guessed and missed.
The missed letters matter more than people expect. Each one removes a whole class of candidates, and marking four or five wrong guesses often cuts the list from thousands to a handful. If you are getting too many results, that is usually the field you have skipped.
The next-letter recommendation
Once the candidate list is built, the solver counts how many of those words contain each letter you have not tried. The letter appearing in about half the candidates is the most useful guess, because it splits the field roughly in two whichever way it goes.
That is a different question from which letter is most common in English. Early in a game they give the same answer. Late in a game, with a tight pattern, they often do not, and the candidate count is the one to trust.
What it will not do
It will not find proper nouns, because names and places are excluded from the dictionary. It will not find phrases, since it matches a single run of letters. And it does not know which word your opponent actually chose, only which words are possible, so a short list is a shortlist rather than an answer.
If you want to know which words make good choices in the first place, the scored word lists are the other half of this. The strategy guide covers guessing without a solver at all.
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Questions
How does the hangman solver work?
You give it the word length, the letters you have already placed and the letters you have guessed wrong. It filters a dictionary of 344,000 words down to the ones that fit, and then counts which unguessed letter appears in the most of them.
Why does it say a blank cannot hold a letter I already have?
Because hangman fills in every position a letter occupies at once. If you have an E showing in one place and there is still a blank, that blank cannot be an E, and ruling it out cuts the candidate list considerably.
How big is the dictionary?
344,076 words between three and fifteen letters, taken from a standard English word list. Proper nouns are excluded, which is why it will not find a name or a place. The count of words actually searched is shown with every result.
How is the next best letter chosen?
It is the letter that appears in the largest share of the remaining candidates, which is the guess that tells you the most whether it lands or not. The percentage next to each letter is exactly that share.
Are the results ranked by how common the words are?
They are ordered by a letter-commonness proxy, not by real corpus frequency, because we do not have corpus frequency data and will not invent it. Words that also appear in this site's own curated lists are shown first, since those are words somebody would plausibly pick for a game.