Hangman, with no letters to guess

Chinese Hangman

A word is hidden and the clue is its English meaning. You name pinyin syllables: say dian and nao and 电脑 fills in. Every wrong syllable puts out a lantern — and when you are stuck, the character is drawn one stroke at a time.

Word Search All Games
How to Play
  • The guess is a syllable. Tap one on the board, or type it and press Enter. A right syllable fills in every character read that way — 爸爸 takes one guess, not two.
  • Read the dashes. Each hidden character shows how many letters its syllable has, which narrows the board fast: _ _ _ _ rules out every three-letter syllable on it.
  • Tones are given, not guessed. You name nao; the game reveals nǎo.
  • Wrong syllables put out lanterns. 6 of them at Beginner, 3 at Expert. When the last one goes out the word is shown and it costs one of your 3 lives.
  • Stuck? Take a stroke. The hint draws one more stroke of the hidden character for 15–30 points, depending on level. It is a ladder — keep pressing until you recognise it.
  • Keep the run going. Every 3 words solved in a row raises the multiplier, up to ×5, and unused lanterns are worth 25 points each.
Every word you solve shows its reading, a to hear it and a link to its dictionary entry, so a round doubles as a vocabulary list.
0 Score
×1 Combo
0 Solved
1 Round
1/5 Word
Lives
6/6 Lanterns lit

Can you spell it before the lanterns go out?

You get the meaning and the shape of the reading. The characters are what you have to produce.

Level
What One Word Looks Like

A Beginner word, mid-solve. dian has been named, so the first character is in with its tone; the second is still four dashes, which is already enough to rule out most of the board.

6/6 Lanterns lit
diàn
电
dian
？
___
computer
HSK 1 · 2 characters · 2 syllables to find
bao dian hao jiao nao nian shao tian xiang zhao

The answer is 电脑 — diàn nǎo, computer. Naming nao finishes it.

Why There Are No Letters

Hangman works in English because the alphabet is small and the word is spelled out of it: twenty-six guesses cover every word there is. Chinese has no such set. There are thousands of characters, so a board of characters would be unplayable, and guessing a character is the whole answer rather than a step towards it.

What Chinese does have is a closed set of about four hundred syllables. Every word is read out of that set, which makes a syllable the right size of guess — small enough to enumerate, big enough that finding one is real progress. It also happens to drill the thing learners are weakest at: you can hold diànnǎo, computer perfectly and still not be able to produce 电脑. Going from the meaning to the sound to the characters is exactly that gap, three times a word.

The word search asks the same question by recognition — find the characters among a hundred others. This asks it by production, which is harder and is why the stroke hint exists: when you cannot recall a character at all, watching it built one stroke at a time is usually enough to bring it back.

Frequently Asked Questions

You guess pinyin syllables instead of letters, because Chinese has no alphabet to work through. A word is hidden one character at a time and the clue is its English meaning; naming a syllable fills in every character that is read that way, so 电脑 needs dian and nao. Each hidden character shows how many letters its syllable has, which is the deduction the dashes give you in ordinary hangman, and a wrong syllable puts out one of your lanterns.

No. You guess the syllable without its tone and the game reveals the tone with the character, so nao fills in 脑 and shows you it is nǎo. Guessing the tone as well would be a different exercise, and this site already has two pages for it: the Tone Trainer drills hearing them and the Tone Pitch Mirror lets you see your own pitch against the target.

It draws the hidden character one stroke at a time, in correct stroke order, for a points penalty each press. That is deliberately a ladder rather than a solution: the whole character would just hand over the answer, so you pay stroke by stroke until you recognise it and can name its syllable yourself. It uses the same self-hosted stroke data as the Stroke Order Race and the stroke order tool, so nothing about which characters you study is sent to a third party.

The official HSK 1 to 6 word lists, and the readings and meanings come from this site's own dictionary — nothing here was written for the game. A word only appears if its published reading can be cut into one syllable per character and every piece is a reading the dictionary gives that character, so the pinyin you see is always the word's own. Words that cannot pass that check, such as 一点儿 where the r is not a syllable of its own, are left out rather than guessed at.

Three things, and the table in the sidebar prints all of them. The level decides which HSK words are hidden, how many wrong guesses you get before the lanterns go out, and how many decoy syllables sit on the board beside the right ones. Beginner is HSK 1–2 with 6 wrong guesses and a board of 10; Expert is HSK 5–6, 3–4 characters, 3 wrong guesses and a board of 24. Every round after the first adds 2 more decoys, up to 6.

It is completely free with no sign-up. Your best score for each level is stored in your browser on this device only. Submitting a score to the leaderboard is optional and uses a nickname, never a real name or email.
What Each Level Changes
Level Words Wrong Board Stroke
Beginner HSK 1–2 6 10 −15
Intermediate HSK 3–4 5 14 −20
Advanced HSK 5–6 4 18 −25
Expert HSK 5–6, 3–4 characters 3 24 −30
Mixed HSK 1–6 5 14 −20
Beginner 142, Intermediate 688, Advanced 891, Expert 191 words. Every round after the first puts 2 more decoy syllables on the board, up to 6.
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Words to Look Up
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Related Resources
Chinese Word Search Stroke Order Race Every Pinyin Syllable, Charted HSK Flashcards HSK Word Lists 1–6 英语猜单词 (English hangman) All Chinese learning games

Where to go next

All Chinese Learning Games Pinyin Wordle Chinese Word Search Chinese Crossword Tone Pair Arcade Pinyin Listening Dictation