Hangman

Hangman is the pen-and-paper classroom classic, here with a proper word bank and a category hint to give you a foothold. A word shows up as a row of blanks, one per letter, and you feed it guesses from the on-screen A-Z or your keyboard; a correct letter fills every place it appears, while a wrong one draws in another stroke of the figure — and six mistakes complete the drawing and end the round. There is a real order of operations to good guessing. Open with the common vowels E, A, O and I to pry the word apart, then reach for the workhorse consonants R, S, T, N and L before anything exotic. Once a few letters are down, let the category hint and familiar shapes guide you — common tails like -ING, -ED and -TION reveal themselves fast — and hold your risky letters back until you are confident, since every miss is a stroke closer to losing. Free to play, hints on every word, and your streak kept in the browser between games.