In short: hangman is a word-guessing game where one player picks a secret word and the others guess it one letter at a time, before a stick figure gets fully drawn. You can make a hangman game three ways: draw it on paper or a whiteboard, build a board in PowerPoint, Google Slides or Canva, or build it with an online hangman maker like Wordwall, Flippity or our own SnapPlay hangman maker and share it by link.
What is hangman?
Hangman is a guessing game for two or more players. One player thinks of a word, phrase or sentence, and the others try to guess it by suggesting letters within a set number of guesses.
How to play hangman
The rules are simple, which is exactly why it’s still around:
- One player picks a secret word and draws a dash for every letter.
- The other players guess one letter at a time.
- If the letter is in the word, it’s written in every spot where it appears.
- If it isn’t, one more part of the stick figure gets drawn.
- You can try to guess the whole word at any point — but a wrong word guess counts as a miss.
- Guess the word before the figure is finished and you win. Finish the figure first and you lose.
If the drawing feels a bit grim — for a classroom, say — plenty of people swap it for something friendlier, like crossing apples off a tree or removing slices from a pie.
Tips for picking good hangman words
However you play it, the words decide whether the game is fun.
- Players guess common letters first. The most common letters in English run E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, L, U, and most people start with vowels.
- Short words with rare letters are the hardest. A 2010 study by Jon McLoone at Wolfram Research found words like “jazz”, “buzz”, “fizz” and “fuzz” among the most difficult to guess.
- Long words are easier than they look. Every correct letter can fill in several blanks at once.
- For a group, use a theme. Animals, movies or words from this week’s lesson give everyone a fair start, and a hint does the same job in a single round.
How to make a hangman game: 3 ways
1. On paper or a whiteboard
This is the original, and it still works best when you’re in the same room.
- Pick a word and keep it to yourself.
- Draw one dash per letter. Leave a gap between words if it’s a phrase.
- Draw the empty gallows off to the side, and write wrong letters underneath it so nobody guesses the same one twice.
- Add one body part for every wrong guess.
That’s all you need. A whiteboard is great for a class, and a notebook is great for a long train ride.
2. In PowerPoint, Google Slides or Canva
When you’re running hangman on a big screen for a class or a meeting, you can build the board once and reuse it. It works the same way in PowerPoint, Google Slides or Canva:
- Make one slide with an empty box or a short line for every letter. Leave a gap between words if it’s a phrase.
- Draw the gallows once with line shapes, off to one side, and add a small “Wrong letters” space under it.
- Save this blank version, so next time you only change the number of boxes.
- Put the slide on the screen in the normal editing view rather than full-screen presenting — that way you can type into it while people play.
- Type each correct letter into its boxes as it’s called. For a wrong guess, write the letter under the gallows and add the next body part: a circle for the head, then a line each for the body, arms and legs.
It’s still you running the game — the players shout out letters and you fill them in. It’s great for a projector in a classroom or a meeting, but it’s not something you can send to people to play on their own. For that, you want an online maker.
3. With an online hangman maker
An online maker turns your words into a game people can play on their own device, from a link. These are the ones we’d look at:
Wordwall. Wordwall is a big platform of classroom activities, and Hangman is one of its templates — players complete the word by picking the right letters. The free Basic plan lets you create up to 3 activities, but Hangman is one of the extra templates that come with the paid Pro plan.
Flippity. Flippity turns a list of words into a game in one step: type your terms, separated by commas or new lines, hit generate and bookmark the page to reuse it. It comes in four hangman-style versions with no hanging at all — Snowman gives six guesses, Flower Power seven, Bomb Squad eight and Apple Picker nine.
SnapPlay hangman maker (ours). We built a hangman maker that runs in the browser. You type a word or sentence (up to 40 characters, letters or numbers), add a hint, and choose how many wrong guesses the player gets, from 6 to 10. Hit Start to play it yourself, or tap Share and we email you a link to send to anyone — with an optional reward link or code that only players who win get to see.
It plays like the classic. Tap or type a letter: if it’s in the phrase it fills every box it belongs to, and if it isn’t, another piece goes onto the drawing. On a phone you tap the letters on screen, so your keyboard never pops up over the game.
The reward option is what makes it more than a classroom game. It turns hangman into a small giveaway — for an event, a launch or a social post — where the answer is your product or your message, and the prize is only revealed to people who solve it.
Here’s how the three compare:
| Wordwall | Flippity | SnapPlay | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Teachers already using Wordwall | A quick word list for a class | Sharing one phrase with a hint, by link |
| How you make one | Pick the Hangman template (Pro plan) and add your words | Type your words on the page, generate, bookmark it | Type a phrase, a hint and how many wrong guesses to allow |
| Wrong guesses | — | 6, 7, 8 or 9 depending on the version | 6 to 10, you choose |
| Extra | Part of a big activity library | Four friendlier versions of the drawing | Optional reward for winners |
Which one should you use?
- Two people, no screen — paper.
- A class or a meeting, one big screen — a slide you build once in PowerPoint, Google Slides or Canva.
- A word list for a class to play on their own — Flippity, or Wordwall if you already have it.
- One phrase with a hint, shared by link, maybe with a prize — our hangman maker.
If you want more than hangman — the same idea with your own art, your products as the answers and a reward at the end — that’s the kind of thing we build. Our ready-made games are a good place to see what that looks like.
Where hangman comes from
Nobody knows exactly where it started. An early version shows up in a book of children’s games collected by Alice Gomme in 1894, called “Birds, Beasts, and Fishes” — and that one didn’t have the hanging drawing at all, players just counted how many tries it took. The drawing came later; a 1902 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer describes a version with it.
It has had a long life since. Wheel of Fortune was inspired by it — Merv Griffin came up with the show after remembering playing hangman with his sister on long car trips as a kid.
See you in the next blog 👋
Sources
- Hangman (game) — Wikipedia — the rules, the 1894 and 1902 history, the friendlier variants, the Wheel of Fortune story, and the letter-frequency and hardest-word findings
- Wordwall — price plans — what the free Basic plan and the Pro plan include
- Flippity — Snowman instructions — how Flippity’s four hangman-style games work
