The history of Hangman

A Victorian parlour game without a gallows

Hangman is older than its drawing. The earliest description we have is in Alice Bertha Gomme's The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland of 1894, where it appears under the name Birds, Beasts and Fishes — and there is no gallows in it at all.

In Gomme's version the chooser writes down the first and last letters of the name of an animal and a dash for each letter in between, and the guessers work inwards. Failed attempts were simply scored rather than drawn. The game was already traditional when she recorded it, which is the usual signal that nobody knows how old it really is.

The execution imagery arrived later and stuck, for a reason that has nothing to do with gruesomeness: a stick figure is an elegant counter. It shows how many guesses are left without anyone having to count, it can be drawn by a six-year-old, and it builds tension because the picture gets worse in a way a tally of marks does not.

The schoolyard century

For most of the twentieth century hangman existed almost entirely on scrap paper, blackboards and the backs of exercise books. It needed no equipment, no board, no cards and no setup, which made it the default game for the five minutes at the end of a lesson — and gave it the reach of a folk song rather than a product.

That also explains why it has no standard rules. A game that spreads by being taught in playgrounds keeps every local variation it picks up: the number of body parts, whether the scaffold counts, whether a wrong word guess is punished, whether the chooser must name a category. All of these are genuinely regional.

Boxed, cartridged, and typed into BASIC

Hangman was one of the first traditional games to be turned into a product and then into software, and it happened almost at once.

• 1976 — Milton Bradley's Hangman. A two-player box with sliding panels, advertised by Vincent Price, whose delivery made a children's word game feel like a horror film. It is the version most people over a certain age picture.
• 1978 — Atari 2600 Hangman, programmed by Alan Miller, who later co-founded Activision. A word-guessing game on a console with no keyboard, driven entirely by a joystick scrolling an alphabet.
• Type-in listings. HANGMAN was a staple of early home-computer programming books, which means a large share of a generation's first program was a word game with a two-dimensional array of letters in it.

Hangman suited early computers for the same reason it suited a blackboard: the state of the game is a short string and a set of letters. It needs almost no memory, and the only hard part is the word list.

What Wordle inherited

When Wordle arrived in late 2021 it was described everywhere as new. Mechanically it is hangman with the information turned up: a fixed word length, a fixed number of attempts, and — the real change — feedback on position as well as presence.

That one change is why Wordle is a solvable puzzle and hangman is a gamble. In hangman a correct guess tells you that the letter is in the word and where — but a wrong guess tells you only that it is absent. In Wordle every guess returns a full row of information whether it is good or bad. Hangman punishes exploration; Wordle pays for it.

The lineage runs the other way too: the commercial game Jotto and the pencil game Bulls and Cows were doing positional feedback decades earlier, and Mastermind put coloured pegs on the same idea in 1970. Hangman is the branch of that family that kept the drawing.

Common questions