Literature for Hangman 📖

Clues for every answer

A one-line clue for every answer, easy to hard. They're the same clues the game's 💡 Hint shows, so you can read them out when you run your own game.

Novel

Long work of narrative fiction, usually written in prose and published as a book, like Frankenstein.

Poem

Piece of literary art using the beauty and often rhythm of language; most written ones are set out in verse.

Story

An account of real or fictional events; a fairy tale is a short one from folklore.

Hero

Real or fictional figure who faces danger with ingenuity, courage or strength; the opposite of a villain.

Villain

Wicked character who is the hero's opposite; their evil actions help drive the plot along.

Plot

The series of related events in a narrative; each event except the last affects at least one other.

Chapter

One of a book's main divisions; 'Down the Rabbit-Hole' is the first in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Author

Creator of an original work; in everyday use, often the writer of a book, article or play.

Fiction

Creative work, chiefly narrative, portraying people, events or places that are imaginary.

Myth

Genre of folklore, mainly narratives central to a society; some explain how its customs began.

Fable

Short tale with humanlike animals, plants or objects that teaches a moral, like The Tortoise and the Hare.

Drama

Fiction shown in performance, such as a play, opera or ballet, in a theatre or on radio or TV.

Prose

Language in its natural, ordinary form, without a perfectly regular rhythm; it differs most from poetry.

Sonnet

Poem form traditionally of fourteen lines with a set rhyme scheme; it began in 13th-century Sicily.

Theme

Major topic, subject or message within a story, like loneliness in Of Mice and Men.

Genre

A category of literature, such as tragedy or comedy, which may be decided by tone, content or length.

Sequel

Work that continues the story of an earlier one, usually with events that follow on from it in time.

Stanza

Group of lines in a poem, usually set off by a blank line; its name is Italian for 'room'.

Setting

The time and geographic place of a narrative; it establishes the main backdrop and mood.

Climax

Point of highest tension in a narrative, where the main character faces the greatest challenge.

Shakespeare

English playwright known as the 'Bard of Avon'; wrote Hamlet, Macbeth and 154 sonnets.

Dickens

Victorian novelist, born in Portsmouth, who wrote Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol.

Tolkien

English writer and Oxford professor who wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Hemingway

American novelist with an economical, understated style; wrote The Old Man and the Sea.

Austen

English writer known for her six novels, including Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion.

Metaphor

Figure of speech with an implied comparison, like 'All the world's a stage' from As You Like It.

Narrator

Person or unnamed literary voice who tells a story, like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.

Allegory

Work whose events and characters typically symbolise moral or political ideas, like Plato's cave.

Soliloquy

Speech where a character voices their thoughts, usually alone on stage, like 'To be, or not to be'.

Protagonist

The main character of a story, who makes key decisions and whose fate readers follow most closely.

Anthology

A collection of literary works chosen by a compiler; from Greek for 'a collection of blossoms'.

Biography

Detailed description or account of a person's life; such works are usually non-fiction.

Dystopia

Imagined society where people lead wretched, fearful lives, like the one in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Satire

Genre that holds vices and follies up to ridicule, usually humorously; Jonathan Swift was a master of it.

Haiku

Short Japanese form of poetry: traditionally three phrases of 5, 7 and 5 sound units, with a seasonal word.

Prequel

Work whose story takes place before that of an earlier work, often explaining the background to it.

Trilogy

Set of three distinct but connected works; most are fiction sharing the same characters or setting.

Simile

Figure of speech comparing two unlike things openly, often with 'like' or 'as': 'a man is like a wolf'.

Antagonist

Character set up as the main enemy or rival of a story's lead, often a villain, like Lord Voldemort.

Flashback

Scene that interrupts to take the narrative to an earlier time; its formal name is analepsis.

Existentialism

Philosophy of the individual's struggle to live authentically, stressing freedom and choice; linked with Sartre.

Postmodernism

Experimental writing style using metafiction, unreliable narration and self-reference; strong in 1960s America.

Intertextuality

How one piece of writing shapes another's meaning, through quotation, allusion, parody or pastiche.

Omniscient

All-knowing; a narrator like this sees everything and knows what each character thinks and feels.

Onomatopoeia

A word that imitates the sound it refers to, like oink, chirp, roar, beep or splash.

Personification

Showing a thing or an idea, like death or the seasons, as a human or with human qualities.

Foreshadowing

Narrative device that plants hints or warnings about events to come, building suspense.

Bildungsroman

Coming-of-age genre about a main character's psychological and moral growth from childhood to adulthood.

Tragicomedy

Genre blending sad and funny forms, e.g. a serious play with a happy ending like The Winter's Tale.

Anachronism

Something out of its proper time, most often a misplaced object; they abound in Shakespeare's works.

Verisimilitude

The 'lifelikeness' or believability of a work of fiction; its Latin roots mean 'truth' and 'like'.

Epistolary

Describes a novel told as a series of letters, often mixed with diary entries and newspaper clippings, such as Dracula.

Solipsism

Philosophical position that only one's own mind is certain to exist; from Latin for 'alone' and 'self'.

Absurdism

Philosophy that the universe is irrational and meaningless, so seeking meaning brings conflict; tied to Camus.

Surrealism

Art movement after World War I that aimed to let the unconscious mind express itself, often in dreamlike scenes.

Denouement

The conclusion or resolution of a plot, coming after the climax; French for 'unknotting'.

Catharsis

Greek for 'cleansing': in drama, stirring up negative emotion in an audience, who then release it.

Dramatic Irony

When the audience knows something the characters don't, so it can see their actions working against them.

Pathetic Fallacy

Giving human feelings and behaviour to things in nature, like sullen clouds or dancing leaves; John Ruskin coined it.

Anthropomorphism

Giving human traits to non-human things, often animals, like the talking animals and sentient toys in stories.