Pocket Games
Hangman
In English the most common letter is E, and the first six — e, t, a, o, i, n — cover well over half of any text. Anyone guessing with whatever consonants come to mind starts with a handicap no amount of luck makes up for.
The rules
There is a hidden word and you see only the empty squares. You propose a letter: if it is there, it appears in every position it occupies; if it is not, another piece is added to the drawing. When the drawing is finished, you have lost.
On Pocket Games
You play solo, with words drawn from a list, or two players on the same phone, with words written by your opponent. Solo, you choose a difficulty, which sets the word length, the mistakes allowed and how the drawing grows:
| Difficulty | Length | Mistakes | The drawing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 5-6 letters | 8 | the gallows gets built too, piece by piece |
| Medium | 7-9 letters | 6 | gallows already standing, then the figure |
| Hard | 10-14 letters | 5 | gallows standing and both arms in a single mistake |
- The words are in the language of the app: a little over a thousand common words of 6 to 14 letters, plus, on easy, the 5-letter words used as solutions in Secret Word. The same word never comes up twice in a row.
- Record: the fewest mistakes you have guessed a word with, per difficulty, stored on your account.
- Two players choose a match of 1, 3 or 5 rounds. In each round both write a word for the other, 3 to 14 letters, hidden behind dots until you tap the eye to see it. The guesser always has 6 mistakes with the gallows already up, whatever the length, and scores as many points as lives left, zero for a miss. Most points wins; a draw is possible.
- On a computer you type the letters on the physical keyboard.
The right order of letters in English
This is the whole game. English letter frequencies are heavily skewed, and playing along with them changes your results outright.
The vowels, in this order: e, a, o, i, u. E alone accounts for around one letter in eight of written English.
Then the consonants, in this order: t, n, s, r, h, l, d, c, m.
Avoid at the start: j, q, x, z, k, v, w. They are rare, and each one is close to a guaranteed mistake while the word is still fully covered.
A good opening run is e, t, a, o, i, n: six letters that leave only two or three possibilities standing in the vast majority of English words.
How to reason once the word takes shape
Look at the endings. English words very often end in -s, -ing, -ed, -y or -tion. If you already have the last letter, you know a great deal about the tense and the number of the word.
Think in clusters. English has combinations that travel together: after a Q there is almost always a U; TH, CH, SH, NG and QU come as pairs. Find one half and the other is free.
Long words are easier, not harder. That is the hangman paradox: a twelve-letter word contains almost all the common letters, and after five vowels it reads itself. Short words are the dangerous ones, because a wrong consonant costs you a life and gives you nothing back.
Playing head to head: how to pick a nasty word
It is not the long word, as everyone assumes. It is the short word with rare letters: five or six letters with a J, a Z or a Q in them are a nightmare, because your opponent does not have enough squares to reconstruct the structure and every miss costs.
Frequently asked questions
Do the words have accents?
Not in English — the whole list is plain A to Z. In the other languages of the app some words do carry accents, and there the keyboard still has 26 letters: pressing A also reveals À, pressing C reveals Ç. An accented letter always counts as its base letter.
Can I guess the whole word at once?
In this game you propose letters, not whole words. Which is a good thing: it removes the gamble and leaves only the reasoning.
Does my record survive if I change phone?
Yes: the lowest mistake count for each difficulty is stored on your account, and between two devices the lower one is kept. Two-player matches leave no record.
Can I leave a word half guessed?
Yes. The letters you have tried stay saved and next time the start screen offers to continue. In two-player mode the match resumes from the round it was in, with the points already scored.
More games to try
See the full list of games, or open Pocket Games in your browser: they are free and you don’t need an account.