How to play

Choose letters to reveal the hidden word in as few guesses as you are able. Typing, clicking and touch input are supported depending on your device.

Don’t forget to click the gear icon (preferences) to set an appropriate difficulty and/or filter level for your self or your child. The default is well filtered, but includes adult-difficulty words that can be too difficult for early grade learners.

Scoring and High Scores

Each game earns points based on how difficult the word is to read, how difficult it is to guess, and how many guesses it takes most people to guess it.

The main score tracked by the game is called your 5-Streak, which is the sum of your last 5 game scores. A High Scores screen tracks the top 5-Streak, 50-Streak and 500-Streak. If you achieve a high score, you will be asked if you want to be on the leaderboard. You can set or change this preference on your Preferences page.

In the event that the scoring algorithm is adjusted to improve accuracy or fairness, your ‘High Score’ may change retroactively.

Game and website, copyright © 2026 by Jeff Hawkins and GateIron, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Words

The word pool is compiled from the SCOWL, ENABLE and AGID word lists among others, with a starting count of 424,404 (alleged) words. With a US-centric lens, proper names, abbreviations, misspellings, archaic words, alternate spellings, and a very few Words-That-Must-Not-Be-Named were turned off.

Word Difficulty

Word difficulty via the preferences attempts to judge the typical grade or life phase a US-English speaking person would have a fair chance of being able to understand and write the word.

The Dolch Sight Words, Fry’s lists and other academic sources were used to guide the lower grades. Age-of-acquisition norms from Brysbaert, subtitle frequencies from SUBTLEX-US, and Google Books Ngrams helped with the middle. Semi-automated and human review covered the rest.

Filtering for Your Environment

Default filtering removes words related to conflict, violence, social issues, harm, bodily functions, sexuality, and insults. Dual-meaning words are filtered, except when the filterable meaning is very uncommon. The default word pool is intended to be uncontroversial and benign.

Filtering decisions were made by comparing to the HurtLex and LDNOOBW offensive-word lists, along with human and AI-assisted reviews. But if this strikes you as censorship, be aware that you can turn off most filtering with preferences (the gear icon).

Credits

NotHangman was designed and built by Jeff Hawkins.

Word definitions are from WordNet 3.1 (Princeton University). Pronunciations are from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University) and misaki (hexgrad).

The crowd cheer is from “Free Crowd Cheering Sounds” by Gregor Quendel, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence and shortened for use here.