Colours Hangman 🌈

Guess the colour before the mango drops. Colours Hangman is the most vivid category in Hangmango — a free, child-friendly hangman alternative you can play instantly in your browser. No gallows, no downloads, no logins: just pick your difficulty and start guessing your way from crayon-box basics to shades an interior designer would recognise on sight but very few people could actually spell.

Colour words for every level

Colours Hangman has three difficulty levels, so it works for younger children and confident spellers alike:

• Easy — the colours in every crayon box, short words every young child already knows.
• Medium — richer shades you'd hear described in clothes shops and paint charts.
• Hard — genuinely obscure shade names, several borrowed from French, that trip up confident adult spellers.

How to guess colour words

Vowels carry real weight here. Colour names are unusually vowel-rich — A, E, I, O and U between them cover a huge share of every word in this category.

Watch for French-derived spellings on Hard. Several of the hardest shade names came into English from French relatively recently, so they don't always follow typical English spelling patterns — expect unusual letter combinations.

-ish and -ine are common endings. A handful of colour words share these endings — once you've placed a couple of letters near the end, test for the pattern.

Don't assume you know a colour just because you've seen it. Some of the trickiest words in this category describe shades everyone recognises visually but very few people could spell correctly on the first try.

Tricky colour spellings to watch

• pigment — the substance that gives something its colour. Silent nothing, but the -igm- combination is easy to mistype.
• saturation — how intense or vivid a colour appears. The -ation ending is common, but the double syllable before it catches people out.
• iridescent — describing a colour that shifts and shimmers, like a soap bubble or a peacock feather. The middle -desc- is the usual trap.
• monochrome — using only one colour, or shades of it. From Greek mono ("one") and khroma ("colour") — the same root as "chromatic" below.
• spectrum — the full range of colours, as seen in a rainbow. Single P, and it's -ectrum, not -ectum.
• chromatic — relating to colour in general, as in "chromatic scale" in music. The ch makes a K sound, easy to forget when spelling from memory.

The stories behind the words

• Orange the colour is named after the fruit, not the other way round — before oranges reached Europe, English simply had no word for the colour and called it "yellow-red."
• Purple comes from the Latin purpura, a dye extracted from sea snails so rare and labour-intensive to produce that only royalty could afford garments dyed with it — hence "royal purple."
• Magenta is named after the 1859 Battle of Magenta in northern Italy — the vivid dye was discovered around the same time and named to capitalise on the news.
• Turquoise comes from the French for "Turkish," since the stone reached medieval Europe via Turkish trade routes, even though it wasn't actually mined in Turkey.
• Crimson traces back through Old Spanish to the Arabic and Persian word for a red dye made from crushed insects — the same family of dyes that gives us "carmine."

Colours Hangman for the classroom

Colour vocabulary is one of the very first topics taught in any language classroom, and this category gives it a genuine competitive edge once children move past the crayon-box basics into real spelling practice. There's no hanging imagery, so it's suitable for every classroom: wrong guesses simply make a mango drop, and there are no ads during play. Teachers can also use Set a word to load in whichever shade the class is learning.

Questions

Is Colours Hangman free?
Yes — completely free, with no account, no download and no ads during gameplay.

Is this good for ESL learners?
Yes — colours are one of the most common early ESL topics, and the three difficulty levels suit beginners through advanced learners.

What ages is this suitable for?
All ages. Easy words work for young children, while Hard shade names will challenge teenagers and adults too.

Can I play on a phone or tablet?
Yes. It works in any browser on any device, with nothing to install.

Can I make my own colour word?
Yes — use Set a word on the homepage to give a friend or class a word to guess.

Play more: Colours · Art · Clothes · For Teachers