Hangman – puzzle for 20 October 2026

Hangman is a daily take on the classic letter-guessing game. Each day there is a new hidden word or phrase to find, with a category as a hint.

It is a short, quick game for your morning coffee that sharpens your vocabulary and your feel for letter frequency.

How to play

1. Pick a letter on the keyboard. If it is in the word, every occurrence is revealed.
2. If it is not, you lose a life. You have six lives.
3. You win by finding every letter before you run out of lives.
4. At the end you can share your time and the lives you had left.

Tips

• Start with the most common vowels (e, a, o, i), then common consonants such as t, n, s, r.
• Always read the category: it narrows the possible words a lot.
• Once a few letters are in place, think about which syllables fit around them.

Strategy

• Let word length guide how bold you are. In a short three- or four-letter word a rare consonant is a big gamble because there are so few places for it to land, while a long word almost always contains several of the common letters.
• Lean on patterns English spelling loves. A Q is nearly always followed by U, a double letter near the end often points to endings like -ERRY or -ELL, and suffixes such as -ING, -TION and -ER are worth testing once the end of the word starts to show.
• If the answer is a phrase, spaces and hyphens are shown from the start. Attack the shortest word first: a two- or three-letter word like THE, AND or OF can often be cracked in a single guess and hands you letters for the longer words.
• When you are down to one or two lives, stop and list every word that fits both the category and the visible pattern. Then pick the letter shared by the most candidates, not the one that only fits your favourite.

A worked example

Imagine the category is 'Fruit' and there are six blank tiles. You start with E and it lands in the third spot: _ _ E _ _ _. A is a miss, so the head appears on the gallows and you have five lives left. R fills two tiles at once: _ _ E R R _.

Now the pattern does the work. A six-letter fruit with a double R near the end suggests a word ending in -ERRY, so you try Y: _ _ E R R Y. H gives _ H E R R Y, and C completes CHERRY. One mistake in total, and the game shows your time so you can compare it with friends.

History of the game

Nobody knows exactly who invented hangman, but it was being played by the late 19th century. Alice Bertha Gomme's 1894 collection of traditional British games describes a forerunner called 'Birds, Beasts and Fishes', in which players guessed the letters of an animal's name.

The game became a classroom staple and later reached television: Wheel of Fortune, which first aired in the United States in 1975, is built on the same letter-by-letter logic. PlayWord's daily Hangman gives every player the same word each day, so results can be compared directly.

Frequently asked questions

Who picks the words?

Daily words are put together by category and checked before release, so they are well known and fair.

Is there a time limit?

No, but your time is recorded so you can compare with friends.