Hangman Helper
Narrow the answer from a known-letter pattern and your wrong guesses, with a best-next-letter suggestion.
Enter what you've solved so far — known letters in their exact position, and an underscore or question mark for every blank square — then list any letters you've already guessed wrong below.
How it works
Hangman is a genuinely older, simpler deduction game than Wordle®, and its rules produce a different kind of information: you know the answer's length from the start (one blank per letter), and every guess is either fully correct — the letter appears in one or more exact positions, revealed on the board — or fully wrong, added to your growing list of incorrect guesses. There's no in-between state; unlike Wordle®'s yellow tile, Hangman never tells you a letter is present-but-misplaced, which makes the two games' underlying search shapes genuinely different even though both involve guessing letters toward a hidden word.
The helper's solveHangman function reflects that directly: give it your known-letter pattern (blanks for anything unrevealed) and the set of letters you've already guessed wrong, and it filters the dictionary down to every word that both matches the pattern exactly and contains none of your excluded letters anywhere at all — not just in the blank positions, but nowhere in the word, since a wrong guess in Hangman rules the letter out completely.
Beyond just listing candidates, the helper ranks every unguessed letter of the alphabet by how many of the remaining candidate words actually contain it, most useful first. This is the standard letter-frequency approach to Hangman strategy made concrete and specific to your exact situation: rather than always guessing E because it's common in English generally, the suggestion is recalculated fresh against only the words that are still actually possible given what you've already learned, which can meaningfully differ from generic letter-frequency advice once a few guesses have narrowed the field.
Everything here runs locally the moment you enter a pattern and your wrong guesses — no puzzle state is transmitted anywhere, so you can check a guess mid-game without slowing anything down or leaving a trace of what you've typed.
Tips & strategy
Trust the recalculated suggestion over a fixed vowel-first rule
"Always guess E, then A, then I" is a reasonable blind opening move, but once you have even one or two confirmed or excluded letters, the ranked suggestion here reflects your actual remaining candidates specifically — which can genuinely diverge from generic English letter frequency once the pool has narrowed.
Feed in wrong guesses the moment they happen
Excluding a letter shrinks the candidate pool more aggressively than most people expect, since it removes every word containing that letter anywhere, not just from one position — entering wrong guesses promptly keeps the suggestion list genuinely useful turn to turn.
Watch for a common ending once most of the word is revealed
Late in a round, several remaining candidates often share a suffix (-ING, -ED, -ER) — if your pattern shows most of a word but the last letter or two are still blank, checking whether the suggested letter matches a common ending pattern can resolve the round faster than working purely off the frequency count.
Use the full candidate list on a risky final guess
When you're down to your last chance, don't rely on the single top-ranked letter alone — scan the actual remaining candidate words and pick the specific word you're most confident in, rather than guessing one more letter and hoping.
FAQ
Is Hangman a trademarked or proprietary game?
No — Hangman is a traditional pencil-and-paper word game with no single company owning the name or rules, unlike Scrabble® or Wordle®. Some commercial board-game or app adaptations use their own separate branding, but the base game itself isn't proprietary, so no trademark disclaimer applies to this tool.
How exactly does the best-next-letter suggestion get calculated?
It counts, across every word still consistent with your pattern and excluded letters, how many of them contain each unguessed letter of the alphabet — the letter appearing in the most remaining candidates is suggested first, since it narrows the field the most no matter how the guess resolves.
Can this help with multi-word Hangman phrases?
It's built around a single word's pattern at a time. For a multi-word phrase, treat each word as its own separate pattern and run them one at a time — the same matching logic applies to each word individually.
Why does a candidate word still contain a letter I already guessed correctly?
That's expected and correct — a confirmed letter is represented as a fixed position in your pattern, not excluded, so every valid candidate the tool returns will naturally include it exactly where you've already revealed it.