Hangman Solver

How the solver chooses a letter

It keeps every word in its dictionary of about 40,000 common English words that matches your pattern: the right length, your known letters in the right places, none of your wrong letters, and none of your known letters hiding in a blank (when a letter is guessed, every copy of it is shown). Then it counts how many of those words contain each letter you haven't tried. The letter in the most candidates is the best guess, because it is the one most likely to be in the word.

That is the same rule our solver uses to score every word on the site. On a blank five-letter word it opens with E (44.6% of five-letter words contain it), then A (41.4%) and R (34.9%). The letter frequency guide has the full table by word length.

Using it fairly

The solver is useful for setters as much as guessers. Before you set a word for a friend, type its blank pattern in: if thousands of words fit and the top letters aren't in your word, you've found a hard one. Teachers can use it to show a class how narrowing works: try _ _ _ _ e, then add one letter and watch the count fall. For lists of words the solver struggles with, see the hardest hangman words.

Names, brand names and very rare words aren't in the dictionary, so a puzzle built on one of those won't solve.

Reading the results

The percentage beside each suggested letter is the share of matching words that contain it. A letter at 90% is almost certainly in the word; a letter at 40% is still the best gamble if nothing scores higher. When only a handful of words remain, look at the list itself: often the remaining words differ in one position, and the best guess is the letter that splits them.