Hangman

About this test

Hangman has been played with pencil and paper since the nineteenth century, and its structure hasn't changed: one player picks a word, the other proposes letters, and every missing letter brings the end closer. Here the computer takes the first player's role, with a clue thrown in and seven wrong guesses allowed per word.

This isn't a vocabulary game, it's a probability game. Letters aren't evenly distributed in a language: in English, E is by far the most common, followed by T, A, O, I, N and S. Opening with K or Z is handing over a life for nothing. A good player always starts with three or four vowels, which reveals the skeleton of the word, then fills in with the commonest consonants.

The second skill is pattern reading. Once a few letters are placed, position matters more than frequency: a final letter after an N suggests a T or a D, a double letter in the middle cuts the candidate list enormously, and a ten-letter word with three E's leaves very little room. And the clue isn't decoration — players who lose read it after burning half their lives.

How it works

Five words drawn at random from a list of twenty, a clue shown for each, seven wrong guesses allowed per word. Only fully solved words count: an almost-finished word is worth nothing. The 0-100 score runs from zero to five words.