Word Guess
Guess the hidden word one letter at a time, before your misses run out. Every word comes with a hint.
Save a set · free
Want your own questions on the word guess? Type them once, save the set, play it any time on any device.
Playing this with a student?
In a lesson, open it from Resources and share your screen — and save your own set first so the game runs on your student's words, not a stock list.
Start freeHow to play
Read the hint out loud first
Every word ships with a one-line hint. Reading it before anyone touches a letter turns a lucky dip into a reasoning task, and it gives a weaker student a way into a word they would never have guessed cold.
Call your letters
Tap a letter to guess it. Correct letters drop into place; a wrong one spends one of your misses. Letters already tried stay marked, so nobody burns a turn repeating themselves.
Say the word, don't just spell it
The moment the word is solved, make the student say it aloud and then use it in a sentence about their own life. Guessing letters is the puzzle; producing the word is the lesson.
Word Guess as a teaching tool
Teach the strategy, not just the word
Most students open with a random consonant and lose three lives before the word takes shape. Two minutes spent on strategy pays off all year: try the vowels first, then the workhorse consonants — R, S, T, N, L — and only then the exotic ones. Ask your student to say why they are choosing a letter before they tap it, and you have turned a guessing game into a spoken argument: "I'll try S, because plurals are common and it's a long word." That sentence is worth more than the word they are hunting.
It is a spelling game wearing a vocabulary costume
Every miss is quiet feedback about English orthography. Students who lose lives on silent letters, doubled consonants or the -tion ending are showing you exactly which spelling patterns have not landed yet. Make a note of the pattern rather than the individual word — a learner who could not find the H in "honest" will also struggle with "hour" and "heir", and that is a five-minute mini-lesson you did not have to plan.
Make the hint do the teaching
Before a single letter is guessed, read the hint and ask for three candidate words that would fit it. You get definition practice, synonym range and a prediction for the class to test — and when the real word appears, the near-misses are a ready-made vocabulary set. Reverse it later: once the word is solved, ask the student to write a better hint for it than the one on the screen. Writing a good definition is harder, and more useful, than reading one.
Groups, levels and the online lesson
In a group, put students in teams and alternate letters, but award the point for saying the whole word in a sentence rather than for the final letter — it stops the strongest speller from running away with the game. With A1 and A2 learners, keep an alphabet chart visible and let them point instead of naming the letter if that is the bottleneck; with B1 and B2, forbid the answer until three letters are showing, which forces them to sit with uncertainty in English. Online, share your screen and have the student call the letter for you to tap: the naming of letters is incidental but real pronunciation practice, and "double-you" catches out more advanced learners than you would expect.
Frequently asked questions
What levels is Word Guess for?
Roughly A1 to B2. The word bank runs from concrete everyday nouns a beginner will know to longer, lower-frequency words that stretch an upper-intermediate student. Because every word comes with a hint, you can play a harder word with a lower level and let the hint carry them — the difficulty lives as much in the hint as in the word.
Is this the same as hangman?
It is the same guessing mechanic — a hidden word, one letter at a time, a limited number of misses — without the gallows drawing. The hint for every word is the main difference in practice: it turns the game from pure letter-frequency guessing into something a student can reason about in English.
How do I use Word Guess in an English lesson?
As a five-minute warm-up or a palate cleanser between heavier activities. Share your screen, read the hint aloud, and make the student justify each letter before you tap it. When the word falls, ask for it in a sentence about their own week. That sequence — hint, reasoning, reveal, production — is what stops it being five minutes of silent tapping.
Can I play it with my own vocabulary list?
Yes. Sign up free, save your own word list as a set, and the game plays your words instead of the stock bank — so the game becomes this week's vocabulary rather than a generic word list. That is the version worth building a lesson around.
Does it work in group classes?
Well, with one rule change: award the point for using the solved word in a correct sentence, not for the letter that finished it. Otherwise the fastest speller wins every round and the rest of the class watches. Teams alternating letters, with a shared life pool, keeps everybody in the game.
Can students play it alone for homework?
Yes — the hint makes it self-contained, so a student can play it on their phone without you in the room. It is most useful as revision before a vocabulary test: ask them to screenshot any word that cost them all their misses and bring those to the next lesson.
More games
The free ones need no signup; open one and play.
Share your screen, they call the letters
Open it from Resources and share your screen: your student calls out letters and you tap them. Save your own word list as a set and the week's vocabulary is the game.
Free to start · No credit card · Your student never pays
Your sentences, not a stock deck
Type your student's own words, errors or target structures into a set once. It saves to your account and the game plays your material instead of a generic list.
The game isn't the whole lesson
Open it from Resources inside the room your video, lesson notes, the Space whiteboard and 700+ ready-to-teach lessons already live in — so a warm-up is two clicks from the work it's warming up.
What came up gets kept
Add a word that comes up and it becomes a flashcard your student keeps practising between lessons — and the post-lesson AI report writes up what you covered.