25 Best Hangman Words | Hacker News Reader

25 Best Hangman Words

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114 pointse1ven27 comments

Wow, wish I had it that easy as a kid. Everybody I ever played with drew in the gallows to begin with, so you just had 6 misses (2x leg, 2x arm, body, head) before you lost.

> 2x leg, 2x arm

What!? Talk about having it easy. Arm and leg are only one part where I'm from.

Yeah, what we would have given to have an arm and a leg. When I was young, our hangmen only had heads. And when you lost, your opponent cut off one of your toes.

Where I'm from, we never declared the game lost until we'd gone through the entire alphabet. Once you drew the whole guy, you had to get creative: add tentacles, a hat, a giant turtle that the gallows is sitting on, one or more flying saucers, and so forth.

"rhythm" works pretty well because they're probably going to burn 5 vowels on it right away.

Yes, but then the y, r, and t are enough to get it immediately -- usually 7 or 8 misses at most in my experience.

My kid beat me with "yoyoyodog".

That word is not in my dictionary.

"Fizz" and "Buzz" are both in there. Just an observation.

Sorry to say, but "Error establishing a database connection" is only 5 words.

my favourite hangman word is tmesis. i'm yet to lose a game with it. it works well psychologically: people very quickly get to t_esis (e and t being the most common letters) but m takes too long: although m is common, tmesis is the only word in the english language that starts like this.

It helps a lot that most people don't know that word.

Yeah I knew the concept but didn't know this word to describe it, good to find out these little things.

i find often even if you don't know the word, you know something about, for example, the phoneme structure of words, which allows you to guess.

it's not just it's not known, but also it has an uncommon composition.

for example, you may not know what the solution to abapi_al is exactly, but reasoning phoenetically should get it quickly.

My favorite words for stumping everybody are: lynx and eczema. I thought for sure that 'lynx' would get on that list since there is only a "sometimes" vowel and an 'x' in there.

Also good are nymph, zephyr, and syzygy.

phlegm works fairly well, too.

Guessing l and/or n isn't too unlikely, and there aren't many words that look like l.n.; I think that explains why lynx doesn't do so well?

Or that a player will plow through all the vowels early, and -y-- doesn't match many words.

I like "queueing" for its long run of vowels. It's not terribly difficult to guess, but does tend to confuse people.

I'm a big fan of words that use w as their only vowel, like crwth, cwm, and pwll. Pwll is especially good because even if they get P and L, most guessers will go through any common vowels they haven't yet tried, and run out of guesses before they even consider W.

If I ever get divorced it's going to be due to my insistence that I was correctly taught "a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y and w" as my vowels.

I don't know Welsh. What is the pronunciation of "Pwll"?

Publishing this is self-defeating, though... now you won't be able to play hangman against any nerds without them guessing "jazz".

I think this just means our Nash Equilibrium has shifted a bit. If the opponent knows you know this, he'll guess 'z' and 'x' more often, so you would use words that included those probabilistically so as to foil this as often as possible. He will then guess them probabilistically accordingly, and eventually Equilibrium returns.

But if you don't wanna go through all that, I'd say just go find some non-nerds to play hangman with tonight, and enjoy the knowledge while you can.

Looks like the site's getting hit pretty hard; mirror here: http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d0uoz/

Muzziness, I never knew that word!

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