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Hangman

With its variations played all around the world, hangman is a widely known letter-guessing game. Teachers of ESL often apply it in their classroom to revise vocabulary and improve general spelling skills (eg. animals, professions etc.).

The game is very simple.

1. One of the players thinks of a word and draws as many dashes (–) on the board as many letters in the word (indicating word boundaries if necessary).
2. The other players take guesses on the letters. If they're right, the player reveals the position(s) of the given letter. If they're wrong, the player writes the letter separately from the word, and starts drawing a hanging tree by adding one additional element to it.
3. If the drawing is complete, the guessers lose.
4. The guesser may, at any point of the game, guess the word (without having to guess all the letters).

In most variations, the guessers have appr. 10-14 guesses, and the schematic drawing shows a hanging tree and ragdoll hanged on it. Violent as it may seem, students love the game without the slightest concern over the brutality of the image.

My motivation in creating an online hangman game was that I’m the worst player of the game. Although I’m as good at spelling as they come, I have troubles with counting the dashes, revealing all positions of the word; in a word, I’m incompatible with Hangman. That is why it was hugely important to me to create an algorhythm that, without fail, helps me in that.

Luckily enough, I came across a Github repository containing every word from the Oxford 3000 list. The Oxford 3000 consists of the core vocabulary of English, equivalent to the vocabulary of an A2 level ESL student. Even with the introduction of slight changes (excluding abbreviations and capitalised words), there are 3804 words on the list the game is based on.

Compared to the word list, establishing a fair score system was way more challenging. It goes without saying that the number of tries is one of the main factors influencing the player’s score. However, the length of the word plays just as critical a role in the game, as it is much more difficult to guess a shorter word with a significantly lower probability of hitting the right letter from a narrow set of letters. Therefore, the player’s score should be inversely proportional to the length of the word (i.e., the shorter the word, the greater the score). Of course, the role of chance is always strong with guessing games, and the strategy of going for the shorter words and “skipping” the longer ones may prove effective.

On the other hand, Hangman is more than just a game, it may also be an effective learning tool in developing students’ phonological (phonotactic) and morphological awareness (e.g., possible consonant clusters, frequent suffixes etc.). Let me illustrate this with an example. So, I am given a five-letter word, and, as per usual, no matter if it is Hangman or Wordle, I am going straight for the most common letters of English: R, A, T, E, S. After that, I have R E _ _ _ , so I know it may be a noun or, more likely, a verb with the prefix re- (meaning ‘back’ or ‘again’). Based on my phonotactic instincts, I can safely say that there should be another (semi)vowel in there (and I could have just started with vowels after all), so I guess the letter Y, and olé, it is a hit, now I have R E _ _ Y . As it cannot be RETRY, RELAY, or REPAY (which might not even be on the list), it should be REPLY.