In my extensive hangman playing experience, I have found that using the word vomit has crushed my opponents again and again. Such a short word is assumed to be easy and they start off overflowing with confidence. Normally, T is the first letter they get and that offers little insight into what the word can be. V is one of the last guesses people cling to, and even once the inevitable M is in place they still can't seem to come up with the word until after I have generously exhausted every feature one can draw on a stick figure and he is long dead.

My favorite hangman word is crypt. Like vomit, it's short, and shorter words are definitely more difficult. Many players will exhaust all the vowels before trying a "Y". They might get the "R" and the "T", but people just don't think of suggesting "C" or "P".

Others that would probably slay most challengers, until they figured out what you were up to:

  • rhythm
  • spry
  • wry
  • scythe

Well, I loaded a dictionary file into 'Microsoft Access' and wrote quite a bit of scripting to go with it, so I have some good suggestions.

It's best to try shorter words, rather than longer ones, because there are more letters that aren't present, and hence more chance of them guessing wrongly.

To foil people asking the vowels (A, E, I, O, U), here are some choice words:

If your opponent read thbz's node on Letter frequency in several languages, the following words don't contain common letters such as E, T, A, O, N, I, H, S, R, D and L:

And if those words can't vanquish your opponents, I don't know what will.

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