Hanging With Friends is similar to playing the classic game of Hangman that everyone grew up playing. It is a word guessing game where you try to figure out the word your opponent has created for you in the appropriate time limit. The amount of points you receive is dependent on which letters and bonus squares you use. Hanging With Friends shares the same dictionary with the Words With Friends game. It is the ENABLE dictionary, which stands for Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon. There are more than 173,000 acceptable words for use. One of the reasons that Hanging With Friends uses ENABLE may be due to copyright issues. No online source is able to identify the exact reasons as to why the Scrabble dictionaries were not used as a resource for word lists, but copyright may or may not be the case. Another possibility for the use of ENABLE could be that the creators of the Hanging With Friends game wanted to distinguish themselves as a different brand of games rather than group themselves with similar games and game resources. Either way, there is not much information online regarding the usage and ‘history’ of why ENABLE has become the standard dictionary of choice for this game.

Like all dictionaries, ENABLE was in fact updated over ten years ago. The update was referred to as a ‘millennium edition’ since it occurred in the year 2000. The first version was released as public domain in 1997, so the update occurred only about three years later. Although the dictionary consists of more than 173,000 permissible words, Hanging With Friends has restrictions when it comes to their word list based on the number of letters in a word to solve or in a word to create. The limit placed on the number of letters in a word is only words with four, five, six, seven, or eight letters. As a result, due to this limitation, this narrows the dictionary significantly. This letter limitation is similar to Words With Friends in that although there are words in ENABLE that have 16 letters or more, you will still be unable to use any of these longer words since they will not even fit on the game board. And, additions and deletions of words will undoubtedly continue as slang and new words are constantly introduced to our ever- changing language. Although ENABLE has fewer words than many other standard dictionaries that are officially used to play other word games, the developers continually try and keep up with newer words, even though they may add these newer words a lot later than sooner. For example, the words QI and ZA were eventually added to the ENABLE dictionary. It was first added to another word game dictionary with many complaints from players. QI means the vital force that in Chinese thought is inherent in all things, and ZA is short for pizza, but it is not an abbreviation; it is an actual word. QI seems pretty acceptable, but ZA is a rather odd word since a majority of people most likely do not call pizza by this shorter word. Even though ENABLE was late to the dictionary game when adding these new words, it is one of the few that has adopted certain modern or slang-like words. For instance, ENABLE allows the use of the word wifi, however, most other word game dictionaries deem wifi as an unacceptable word. All these additions and exclusions keep players on their toes since certain words they thought would be acceptable during a game of Hanging With Friends, may no longer be the case. Double checking and looking up words will reinforce your spelling skills as well as your vocabulary.

INSTRUCTIONS

Word Solver

1.  In the Word Solver, select the number of the letters in the answer.
2.  Enter the confirmed letters of the word.
3.  Input the letters that are not in the answer.

Word Maker

1. Enter your letters in the Word Maker box.  Inlcude any bonus tiles that you may have and click on the “Make Words” button.
   
2. You can select the number of letters to have in the word as well as the difficulty level of the word by checking the appropriate boxes.