Funny Hangman Words, From Kerfuffle to Zugzwang: how it works
Funny hangman words pay off twice: once while the blanks fill in, and again when somebody swears Codswallop is not a real word. It is. All 150 words here have a dictionary entry, and every card shows a letter count, a guess level and a clue. Press New word and draw the blanks on paper.
Eleven kinds of silly
Each pill deals one kind of word. Fuss and uproar has Hullabaloo and Pandemonium, Rascals and fusspots has Nincompoop and Worrywart, and Things to shout runs from Gadzooks to Gesundheit. For fun hangman words a young table can spell, tap Animals with odd names or Food with silly names: Platypus, Narwhal, Pickle, Flapjack. For a party, deal 10, tap Lock on the keepers and press Print.
Short sound effects are the hard ones
A computer guesser that knows a dictionary played each word, always calling the letter most likely to fit. Two wrong calls or fewer counts as easy, six or more as hard. Of the 150, 64 came out easy and 38 hard. The 20 words of five letters or fewer cost 8.5 misses on average; the 52 of ten letters or more cost 1.6. Sound effects is the toughest pill, with 8 hard words of 13. Dictionary oddities is the gentlest: 10 of its 14 scored easy.
Tips
Zap, Guff and Fez each cost the guesser 13 misses or more on three or four letters. Agree on the number of misses before you set one.
These words are rare, so read the clue aloud after the third miss.
Six words cost no misses at all, among them Pumpernickel, Gesundheit and Rambunctious. Tap Easy to guess for the 64 that cost two or fewer.
Questions and answers
Are these all real words?
Yes. Every word has an English entry in Wiktionary, and the one candidate without an entry was dropped. Some have a recorded birthday: Hornswoggle is an American coinage of 1829, Bafflegab dates from 1952, and Lewis Carroll invented Chortle and Galumph for one poem. Words with two accepted spellings were left out.
What makes hangman words funny for adults?
Rarity. Dictionary oddities holds 14 words most grown-ups have never met, such as Borborygmus, the medical word for a rumbling gut, and Gongoozler, someone who idly watches boats. If you came for funny hangman words for adults, know that every word here is clean, so one list serves the whole family.
Do sound effects and shouts count in hangman?
House rules differ on slang, so agree before the first word. Oink, Ribbit, Kaboom and Yikes all have dictionary entries. They are also hard to guess: Sound effects averaged 6.6 misses a word and Things to shout 5.1, against 2.0 for the oddities.
Gin Rummy Score Sheet That Adds the Boxes and BonusesTwo players to 100 with the game bonus, shutout and boxes added by the sheet, on the 20 or the 25 scale. Oklahoma gin to 150 and two plain rummy sheets are one tap away.
Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt Printable80 look-and-point finds for a child shopping with an adult, sorted by department, 40 of them with no reading needed.
Brouhaha8 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A noisy stir over very little. English borrowed it from French.
Conniption10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A fit of anger or panic.
Donnybrook10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A free-for-all, named after a Dublin fair held every year from 1204 into the 1800s.
Hootenanny10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: An informal show by folk singers where the audience joins in.
Hubbub6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: The blur of many voices talking at once in a busy room.
Hullabaloo10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A loud, confused noise from an excited crowd.
Kerfuffle9 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A fuss over something small, like who sat in whose chair.
Pandemonium11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Wild uproar. John Milton coined it for his poem Paradise Lost.
Ruckus6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A noisy disturbance, as when the dog meets the mail carrier.
Rumpus6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A rowdy commotion. Some houses have a playroom named for it.
Shenanigans11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Playful mischief or sneaky tricks.
Tizzy5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A state of nervous fluster, usually over something minor.
Tomfoolery10 letters, medium to guess. Clue: Silly behavior that gets nothing done.
Nonsense and humbug 13
Bafflegab9 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Confusing official jargon. The word was coined in 1952.
Balderdash10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Senseless talk or writing. Say it when you do not believe a word.
Claptrap8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: Empty talk. It began around 1730 as theater slang for a cheap trick to win applause.
Codswallop10 letters, medium to guess. Clue: British slang for complete nonsense.
Fiddlesticks12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A mild cry of disbelief. One of them is the bow used on a violin.
Gibberish9 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Speech or writing that makes no sense at all.
Guff4 letters, hard to guess. Clue: Foolish talk, or cheeky back talk.
Hogwash7 letters, medium to guess. Clue: Nonsense, and before that the kitchen scraps fed to pigs.
Hokum5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: Nonsense dressed up to look impressive.
Humbug6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A hoax or sham. Nobody knows where the word came from.
Jabberwocky11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Nonsense language, from the title of a Lewis Carroll poem.
Piffle6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: Foolish talk not worth answering.
Tommyrot8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: Utter nonsense, in old British slang.
Rascals and fusspots 14
Bigwig6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: An important person. The name comes from the large wigs once worn by men of rank.
Blabbermouth12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Someone who cannot keep a secret.
Chatterbox10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A person who never stops talking.
Copycat7 letters, medium to guess. Clue: One who imitates whatever someone else does.
Curmudgeon10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A grump with a complaint for every occasion.
Fusspot7 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A person who worries over tiny details.
Klutz5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A clumsy person. The word came from Yiddish.
Landlubber10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A sailor's name for someone unused to the sea.
Nincompoop10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A silly or foolish person.
Rapscallion11 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A mischievous rascal, in old-fashioned talk.
Slowpoke8 letters, easy to guess. Clue: The last one out the door, every time.
Spoilsport10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A person who ruins a game by refusing to play along.
Swashbuckler12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A swordsman given to showy, daring swordplay.
Worrywart9 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Someone who frets about everything that might go wrong.
Animals with odd names 14
Aardvark8 letters, easy to guess. Clue: An African burrowing mammal whose Afrikaans name means earth pig.
Axolotl7 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A salamander with a Nahuatl name that keeps its gills and stays in the water for life.
Blobfish8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A deep-sea fish from the waters off Australia, named for its shape.
Bobolink8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A North American songbird named for the sound of its song.
Dodo4 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A large flightless bird, related to the pigeon, extinct since the 1600s.
Gnu3 letters, medium to guess. Clue: Three letters for a wildebeest. The G is silent.
Kinkajou8 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A tree-dwelling relative of the raccoon, also called the honey bear.
Kookaburra10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: An Australian kingfisher whose name copies its loud, laughing call.
Mudskipper10 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A fish that can live in and out of the water and gets about on land by jumping.
Narwhal7 letters, easy to guess. Clue: An Arctic whale whose males carry a long spiral tusk.
Nudibranch10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A soft-bodied sea slug, often brightly colored.
Platypus8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: An egg-laying mammal from eastern Australia with a bill like a duck.
Quokka6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A marsupial from southwestern Australia, about the size of a house cat.
Wildebeest10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: An African antelope also called the gnu.
Food with silly names 13
Blancmange10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A wobbly dessert of sweetened milk set with cornstarch.
Butterscotch12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A golden candy, and the sundae sauce that shares its flavor.
Chimichanga11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A deep-fried burrito.
Flapjack8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A pancake, named for being flipped on the griddle.
Gnocchi7 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Small Italian dumplings made of potato or semolina. The G is silent.
Kipper6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A split, salted and smoked herring.
Kohlrabi8 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A cabbage relative with a swollen, turnip-shaped stem.
Kumquat7 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A small, orange citrus fruit native to Asia.
Pickle6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A cucumber kept in brine, or a tricky spot to be in.
Pumpernickel12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A dark German sourdough bread made from rye.
Rutabaga8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A root vegetable also called the swede or Swedish turnip.
Strudel7 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A pastry of thin dough rolled around a fruit filling.
Succotash9 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A dish of corn kernels and lima beans.
Sound effects 13
Chortle7 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A gleeful chuckle. Lewis Carroll coined it in a nonsense poem published in 1871.
Fizzle6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: To hiss and sputter out, like a damp firework.
Guffaw6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A loud, hearty burst of laughter.
Gurgle6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: The bubbling sound of water going down a drain.
Honk4 letters, hard to guess. Clue: The sound of a goose or a car horn.
Kaboom6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: The sound of an explosion in a comic strip.
Oink4 letters, medium to guess. Clue: What a pig says.
Ribbit6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: What a frog says, at least in English.
Squelch7 letters, medium to guess. Clue: The sound of boots in deep mud.
Thwack6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: The sound of a hard hit with something flat.
Vroom5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: The sound of an engine revving.
Yodel5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: To sing with quick jumps between a normal voice and a high one.
Zap3 letters, hard to guess. Clue: The sound of a sudden burst of electricity.
Things to shout 13
Abracadabra11 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A magician's word. Five of its eleven letters are A.
Ahoy4 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A call to hail a ship.
Blimey6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A British cry of astonishment.
Crikey6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A cry of surprise heard in Britain and Australia.
Eureka6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: Greek for I have found it, the cry credited to Archimedes.
Gadzooks8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: An old-fashioned cry of surprise.
Gesundheit10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Said after a sneeze. It was borrowed from German.
Huzzah6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: An old cheer of joy or approval, often tied to sailors.
Phooey6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: Said to show disgust or disbelief.
Pshaw5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: An old scoff of disbelief, five letters with one vowel.
Yikes5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: Said when something alarms you.
Yippee6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A shout of delight.
Zounds6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A cry of shock heard in old plays.
Wiggly doing words 18
Bamboozle9 letters, easy to guess. Clue: To trick or confuse someone.
Bloviate8 letters, easy to guess. Clue: To speak at length in a pompous way. It is American, from Ohio in the 1840s.
Flabbergast11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: To astonish someone completely.
Flummox7 letters, medium to guess. Clue: To confuse someone completely.
Galumph7 letters, medium to guess. Clue: To move with heavy, clumsy steps. It first appeared in a Lewis Carroll poem.
Hoodwink8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: To deceive by a trick. It first meant to blindfold.
Hornswoggle11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: To cheat or swindle, a jokey American coinage from 1829.
Kvetch6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: To complain without stopping. The word came from Yiddish.
Lollygag8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: To dawdle when there is work to do.
Mollycoddle11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: To pamper someone far too much.
Mosey5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: To stroll along without any hurry.
Perambulate11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A grand word for taking a walk.
Quibble7 letters, hard to guess. Clue: To argue over a trivial detail.
Shimmy6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: To shake the shoulders back and forth in a dance.
Skedaddle9 letters, easy to guess. Clue: To run off in a hurry. The word spread during the American Civil War.
Slobber7 letters, hard to guess. Clue: To let drool run from the mouth, as a happy dog does.
Vamoose7 letters, easy to guess. Clue: To leave quickly. It is an alteration of a Spanish word.
Waddle6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: To walk with short, swaying steps, as a duck does.
Gizmos and getups 14
Bobblehead10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A collectible doll with a bobbing head.
Contraption11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A machine that looks complicated and none too steady.
Cummerbund10 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A broad pleated sash worn around the waist with formal dress.
Doodad6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A small object with no proper name, recorded since the 1880s.
Doohickey9 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A small thing whose name you cannot recall. First recorded in 1914.
Fez3 letters, hard to guess. Clue: A flat-topped felt hat with a tassel, named after a city in Morocco.
Glockenspiel12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A percussion instrument of tuned metal bars struck with mallets.
Gubbins7 letters, medium to guess. Clue: British for odds and ends of little value.
Jalopy6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A battered old car. The first written use dates from 1924.
Muumuu6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A long, loose dress from Hawaii.
Sousaphone10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A marching brass instrument that wraps around the player's body.
Spork5 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A spoon and a fork in one. The name is a blend of the two.
Vuvuzela8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A long plastic horn with a loud buzz. The name comes from Zulu.
Whirligig9 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Anything that spins, such as a toy top or a garden pinwheel.
Describing words 11
Cantankerous12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Bad-tempered and quick to argue.
Gargantuan10 letters, medium to guess. Clue: Huge. It comes from the name of a giant in the books of Rabelais.
Ginormous9 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Extremely large, a blend of gigantic and enormous.
Gobsmacked10 letters, medium to guess. Clue: British slang for utterly astonished.
Ornery6 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Stubborn and hard to deal with.
Rambunctious12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Noisy, energetic and hard to control.
Snazzy6 letters, medium to guess. Clue: Stylish in a flashy way.
Spiffy6 letters, hard to guess. Clue: Smart and neat in appearance.
Wonky5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: Crooked, off-center or unsteady.
Woozy5 letters, hard to guess. Clue: Dizzy and unsteady.
Zany4 letters, hard to guess. Clue: Comical in an odd, clownish way.
Dictionary oddities 14
Absquatulate12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: To leave in a hurry, an American mock-Latin joke word of the 1830s.
Borborygmus11 letters, medium to guess. Clue: The medical word for a rumbling in the gut.
Bumbershoot11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A playful word for an umbrella.
Collywobbles12 letters, medium to guess. Clue: An upset stomach, or a case of nerves.
Doodlesack10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: An old word for the bagpipes, borrowed from German.
Gardyloo8 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A warning cry before waste was thrown from a window, first recorded in Edinburgh in 1662.
Gongoozler10 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Someone who idly watches boats go by.
Humdinger9 letters, easy to guess. Clue: Something remarkably good. First recorded in a Montana newspaper in 1883.
Milquetoast11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A timid person, named for a comic strip character first drawn in 1924.
Quidnunc8 letters, medium to guess. Clue: A person eager for news and gossip, from the Latin for what now.
Smellfungus11 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A faultfinder, named for a grumbling traveler in a 1768 novel by Laurence Sterne.
Snollygoster12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: A shrewd, unprincipled person, in old American slang.
Sternutation12 letters, easy to guess. Clue: The formal word for a sneeze.
Zugzwang8 letters, hard to guess. Clue: In chess, having to move when every move makes things worse.
How this list was compiled: Own selection by the Game Night Generator editors, written for this page and screened against the site's clean-deck rules: nothing sexual, no alcohol, drugs, gambling or gore, no real living people, no brand names, and no word whose dictionary entry carries a crude second sense. Words with two common spellings were left out (so no flimflam, harrumph, malarkey or hiccup), and no word repeats the site's good hangman words list or its seasonal list. Every word was confirmed to have an English entry in Wiktionary, read through the MediaWiki API at https://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php on 2026-09-19; one candidate with no entry was dropped. Word histories in the clues come from the same Wiktionary entries, read 2026-09-19: pandemonium (coined by John Milton in Paradise Lost), donnybrook (Donnybrook Fair, held annually from 1204 until the mid 19th century), claptrap (theater slang, about 1730), hogwash (swill fed to pigs), humbug (origin unknown), bafflegab (coined 1952), bigwig (the large wigs of men of authority), klutz and kvetch (from Yiddish), chortle and galumph (coined by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky, published 1871), skedaddle (about 1861, Civil War use), vamoose (from Spanish), hoodwink (first to blindfold), hornswoggle (1829, US), bloviate (Ohio, 1845), doohickey (first attested 1914), doodad (since the 1880s), jalopy (first written use 1924), fez (named after Fez, Morocco), muumuu (from Hawaiian), vuvuzela (from Zulu), ginormous (gigantic plus enormous), gargantuan (Rabelais' giant Gargantua), eureka (attributed to Archimedes), aardvark (Afrikaans, earth pig), bobolink (imitative), blobfish (from its shape), absquatulate (1830s American mock-Latin), quidnunc (Latin, what now), doodlesack (from German), gardyloo (first attested 1662, burgh records of Edinburgh), milquetoast (Caspar Milquetoast of the comic strip The Timid Soul, 1924), humdinger (first attested 1883, Livingston, Montana) and smellfungus (a traveller in A Sentimental Journey). Animal and object facts were checked on Wikipedia on 2026-09-19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwhal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinkajou, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildebeest, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quokka, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudibranch, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudskipper, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spork, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glockenspiel and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sentimental_Journey_Through_France_and_Italy (1768, Laurence Sterne). Each word was scored by our own simulation on 2026-09-19: a guesser who knows the word's length and the 210,773 lower-case entries of the Webster's Second word list that ships with macOS always calls the letter found in the most words that still fit. x.misses is the number of wrong calls it made; easy is 0 to 2, medium 3 to 5, hard 6 or more. The method follows Jon McLoone's 2010 study, https://blog.wolfram.com/2010/08/13/25-best-hangman-words/ (read 2026-09-19). Game rules on the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangman_(game), read 2026-09-19. Licence: own work