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HOW TO PLAY. Click the "New Game button" to display the blank underlines for the first word to solve.
To guess a letter, type any letter of the alphabet into the box to the left of the New Game button. Then press the ENTER key on your keyboard.
If the letter you guessed forms part of the hidden word, the letter appears in one or more of the blanks in the word.
If the letter is not in the word, the message "Incorrect" appears and a stick is added to the hangman. If you make too many wrong guesses, you'll be hung, of course!
Hint. This version of hangman is hard, but not impossible. I got 10 in a row the first time I tried it.
How did I do it? I let you in on a little secret that every cryptographer and fan of Edgar Alan Poe probably knows:
Certain letters appear more commonly in English words than other letters. So if you know the order of the most common letters, you get a head start in games like Hangman.
Poe created one of the first of these "letter frequency" sequences. He used it to solve a mystery in his awesome short story, The Gold Bug (one of my favorites).
The sequence he came up with was "ETAOINSHRDLU". If you memorize this sequence, you should do great when playing Hangman or any similar game such as Wheel of Fortune.
I remember the ETAOINSHRDLU sequence by using the memory technique called "chunking". Chunking just means to break it down into smaller bits.
My chunks are "E" + "TAO" + "IN" + "SHR" + "D" + "LU". It has a certain rhythm to it that makes it easy to remember after you repeat it a few times.
Following this pattern, whenever you play Hangman you should always guess "E" first. Then guess "T". Then "A". And so on.
Make sure to pay attention to the word as you go along! As soon as there are enough letters for you to figure out what the word is, then let your thinking brain take over. Just use ETAOINSHRDLU to get you started.
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