Uncover the secret word letter by letter, but every wrong guess draws you closer to the gallows.
A hidden word is shown as a row of blanks. Guess one letter at a time: a correct letter reveals every spot it appears, while a wrong guess adds another part to the figure. Solve the word before six wrong guesses complete the drawing.
Nobody knows where hangman came from, but a version without the gallows is older than the version with it.
Alice Gomme recorded a variant in her 1894 collection of children's games, Birds, Beasts, and Fishes. That form had no drawing at all: players simply kept score of how many attempts each took to fill in the blanks.
The hanging imagery appears later, described in a 1902 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The drawing is the part that made the game stick — it turned an abstract count of wrong guesses into a picture that gets worse, which is a considerably better clock than a tally.
Hangman is the traditional pencil-and-paper word-guessing game, rebuilt here as an original, free browser version with multiple themed categories, daily challenges and a progressive gallows drawing.