The history of hangman: from Victorian origins to iPhone.
Where did the game hangman come from? The short answer: nobody's entirely sure. The longer answer takes us through Victorian parlour games, mid-century schoolyards, and the pocket computers we all carry around today.
Victorian parlour roots
The earliest published rules for hangman appear in Alice Bertha Gomme's 1894 collection Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, under the name "Birds, Beasts, and Fishes." Two players took turns guessing letters of a hidden word, and wrong guesses drew a stickman on a gallows. The game was already old enough by the 1890s to be worth cataloguing — it almost certainly circulated as an unwritten parlour amusement for decades before that.
Why a gallows?
The dark imagery is Victorian through and through. Parlour games of the era regularly mixed drawing-room civility with a slightly macabre streak — think ghost stories at Christmas, mourning jewellery, and Punch and Judy. A stickman on a gallows was unsettling enough to be funny and simple enough to draw with a pencil stub.
The paper-and-pencil century
For a hundred years, hangman survived on the back of exercise books, restaurant napkins, and long car journeys. All it needed was two people, one pen, and a scrap of paper. Six wrong guesses, head-body-arms-legs — the rules were passed down largely by imitation, which is why house rules still vary wildly (do you pre-draw the gallows? does the noose count? can you guess the whole word at once?).
Wheel of Fortune and the mainstream
When Wheel of Fortune launched in 1975, it dressed hangman up in prizes and a spinning wheel, but the core loop was the same: guess letters, reveal the phrase. Millions of viewers learned the game's rhythm without ever touching a pencil — and the "phrase" variant, still less common on paper, went mainstream on television.
From paper to pocket computer
Hangman was one of the earliest games ported to home computers — a hangman program appears on almost every BASIC textbook listing from the late 1970s onwards. It's a natural fit: tiny state, minimal graphics, and a familiar loop that teaches loops and string handling. From there it went to Palm Pilots, feature phones, and eventually the iPhone.
Hangman today
The version most people play now is a phone version. The Hangman iPhone app keeps the Victorian rules — six wrong guesses, one stickman — and adds five languages, themed word packs, global and custom leaderboards, and private boards you can share with friends. The pencil is optional; the game is still the same one Alice Bertha Gomme wrote down in 1894.