Hangman

A word is chosen and drawn as one blank per letter. You name a letter at a time. If the word contains it, every copy appears at once — guess A in banana and all three land together. If it does not, one part of the hanged figure is drawn: head, body, two arms, two legs, six in all. Find every letter before the sixth miss and you win. Guessing a letter you have already tried does nothing at all here: it is not a miss, and it does not cost a guess.

E, but by less than most players think, and not at every word length. Across the 25,322 words this game draws from, 62.8% contain at least one E — which is the number that matters, not E's famous 12.7% share of letters in running text. The gap narrows sharply on short words, and on five-letter words S is almost level with E because so many of them are plurals.

So count the blanks before you open. On a four-letter word A is worth almost exactly as much as E and the two of them settle the vowels quickly; on an eight-letter word I is a better second guess than A, because long words are built from Latin endings full of I.

Six here, and six is the common playground standard: head, body, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg. The gallows — base, post, beam and rope — is drawn before you start and is never part of the count. That is the rule most software versions quietly change: drawing the gallows one stroke at a time turns six chances into ten or thirteen and makes a much easier game, which is why two people who learned hangman in different schoolyards argue about whether a word was fair.

• Six parts — the figure only. What this game uses.
• Ten parts — figure plus a four-piece gallows. Generous.
• Thirteen parts — as above with hands, feet and facial features added.
• Extra limbs — some house rules add ears or a hat purely to rescue a child who is losing.

The word is always a real English word from a fixed list and every letter of it is on the keyboard, so nothing is ever unguessable. Whether six chances are enough is a different question, and the honest answer is that they are not enough for lazy play. Take a guesser who simply works down the English frequency order — E T A O I N S H R D L C U M W F G Y P B V K J X Q Z — and never looks at the pattern: across the whole word list that guesser needs 11.2 wrong letters on average and finishes inside six only 14.4% of the time. Reading the pattern is not a flourish, it is the game.

Rare letters, not length. Score a word by how many wrong letters a frequency-order guesser burns on it and attention comes out at zero — every letter in it is near the top of the order — while buzz and jazz cost 23, almost the whole alphabet. Long words are usually easier, because a long word shows you more pattern per guess and almost certainly contains an E. The difficulty levels here are built on exactly that measure rather than on word length alone.