Hangman strategy

Guessing: the order that actually works

Open with E and A. They appear in more words than anything else and either one landing gives you the shape of the word rather than just a letter.

Then stop guessing vowels. The common mistake is to clear all five before touching a consonant, and U in particular is a poor bet: it turns up in far fewer words than R, T, S or N. Once you have E and A, the useful guesses are consonants.

After three or four letters, stop counting frequency and start reading the pattern. A word ending in a revealed E with a blank before it is very often -LE, -SE or -RE. A double blank in the middle with vowels either side is usually a common consonant pair. At that point the letters in front of you are worth more than any table.

Use the length before you use a letter

The number of dashes is information you get for free and most guessers ignore. Three and four letter words are dominated by a small set of shapes. Words over ten letters are almost always built from ordinary letters, so an opening of E, A, I, O, N, R will usually land several times.

It follows that a long word is the easier problem. If you are staring at fourteen blanks, relax; if you are staring at four, be careful.

Choosing: how to actually be difficult

Everything above tells you what to deny. A word that beats a competent guesser has a low share of the letters E T A O I N S R, few vowels, and no repeated letter to reveal two positions at once. One rare letter helps, but it is the common letters being absent that does the work.

Notice what is not on that list: how unusual the word is. Obscurity only matters in the last moment, when a guesser has most of the letters and has to recognise the word. Everything before that is decided by spelling, which is why the hard list here is full of ordinary words and short on exotic ones.

If you want the formula rather than the principle, it is on the methodology page, and the create page scores your word as you type it.

When you are properly stuck

Count what is left. If you have a pattern and four or five wrong letters marked off, the field is usually far smaller than it feels, and the right guess is the letter that appears in about half of the remaining candidates rather than the one that is commonest overall.

That is exactly what the solver computes, and it is worth running once or twice just to see how quickly a few marked-off letters cut the field.

One correction to everything above

The frequencies on this page come from our own word lists, which are words a person would plausibly pick. Run the same count over a full 344,000-word dictionary and something changes: E is not the best opening for short words at all. For three, four and five letter words A beats it, and E only takes the lead from six letters upward.

That table is on the best first guess page, computed per length. If you take one thing from this page, take that one: count the blanks before you open.