We find that statistical guessing works well for the first couple of guesses to narrow down the possible words; once you get down below 30 - 40 words, hit "generate wordlist" to use your knowledge of your opponent's preferences to pick the most likely candidates! For guessing longer words, try our Wheel of Fortune Solver.
Important: Solver assumes that if a letter occurs multiple times in a word, you see all of the occurances when you correctly guess the letter.
Our hangman solver uses statistics to find the most likely letters in the word. To use this solver. enter the letters you know (or know aren't in a word). It will give you a list of possible words and identify the most likely letters.
This solver is basically a word generator - once you give it part of the word, it uses pattern matching to find relevant possibilities. The suggest letters feature looks at the set of possible words and uses statistical analysis to recommends letters that are highly likely to be in the word. The word generator provides a list of words for you to review which the word generator will update with ever new letter you type. The underlying process is based on conditional probability - eg. if I know 2 letters in a five letter word and 3 wrong guesses, what is the distribution of words containing each of the remaining letters in the alphabet. This lets us calculate the probability of a right/wrong answer.
The analytics behind developing a good word game solver program are fairly complicated. We've got a computer model we use to test strategies and guessing patterns across the scrabble dictionary the game was based on. It solves for missing letters and can do some basic analysis of letter frequencies (inferences based on common letters, vowel placement, character options, length, consonants) for secret word puzzles.
This program uses the Enable dictionary, which matches the one used by Zygna. Always remember you are playing against a person, not a computer. This is where a good hangman cheat can pick up points. In the real word, people have biases. They tend to pick words they think are hard or funny. They will often ignore words they think are "too obvious". The goal of a good hangman cheat is to be slightly smarter than usual. Try to shave a point or two off your score but not enough to be get caught. This works for other word puzzle games and as a crossword solver as well. If you are trying to solve a phrase, look at our wheel of fortune solver (below).
Remember to play the person and not the hand - if you see a word which fits their personality or speach patterns, then go ahead and focus your guessing around that word. The best strategy for a hangman cheat is to pursue small advantages. If you are 5% smarter most of the time, you will get away with it. If you seek moments of blazing brilliance, your days as a hangman cheat will quickly come to an end.
You should also check out our blog - there are a number of posts on the blog about strategy & some of the analytics we've done around this - particularly for picking the best words (most difficult to guess).
So we've got hangman answers covered with the hangman solver. Our hangman word guesser generates a word list of hangman words. If you need a hangman solver which can handle multiple words, check out our wheel of fortune solver. That particular tool is an extention of the hangman solver that is designed to solve multi-word puzzles.
Looking for new puzzles, classic game options, and new word games? We're regularly expanding our collection of puzzles and word games. Check out our Free Cryptogram puzzles if you are good at recognizing patterns. These are famous (or funny) quotes encryped with a scrambled alphabet code - if you can guess the code, you can decipher the message. Or check out our new word swapz game if you like unscrambling words. Flip letters back and forth until you manage to figure out all the words in the puzzle.
Stuck solving a puzzle? No worries, we can help with that too! We offer a wide variety of word solver tools to help crack pen and paper ciphers, solver jumbled letters, and find anagrams! We have solvers for boggle, scrabble, and tools to help unscramble words. You can even use them to solve words with friends and the specialized versions of boggle (Scramble with Friends and large matrixes - 5 x 5 boggle and 6 x 6 boggle cheat tool).
Finally, if you need to make a word scramble or crossword puzzle - for a class exercise, business icebreaker, party favor, or other special occaision - we've got tools for that too. You can even save you work for future events and classes. These are perfect for teachers, students, homeschoolers, coaches, sunday school teachers, and team mom / dads.