Bang or No Bang Game 6: Hangman

In the popular game "Hangman" you have to guess a phrase (a film or book title, someone's name etc) by guessing the letters one at a time.

For example, which film is represented by this:

_ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _

The "/" means a new word, so this film title has two words, the first has three letters, the second has five.

You now have to guess one letter at a time, and see if your letter appears in the name. What letter shall we pick? Let's pick "S" as our first letter. The person who chose the film title should now write in where each and every "S" appears.

_ _ _ / S _ _ _ _

Hurrah! What letter will you pick next? T?

T _ _ / ST _ _ _

Do you know what the film is yet? What if you're next guess is "Y"?

T _ Y / ST _ _ Y

When playing "Hangman" there are certain letters that you should choose, and some that you probably shouldn't. You can work out which letters you should pick by creating a frequency distribution. For this, get any book (a novel is best) and pick a page. Now count how many times each of the letters in the alphabet occurs on that page.

You'll notice that some letters, like E, T and S occur quite often, while others, like X, Z and Q occur much less often.

The frequency distribution of letters in the English language looks like this:

You can see from this graph which letters occur most often. The "Relative Probability" axis is a measure of how often any letter occurs in a normal piece of writing in English. Different languages have different frequency distributions.