Word.ws English Dictionary

unexpected hanging paradox

unexpected hanging paradox noun: a paradox about a person's expectations about the timing of a future event which they are told will occur at an unexpected time. It is based on the idea that a prisoner, told that he will be hanged on a day unknown to him, concludes that "I cannot be hanged on Friday because if I haven't been hanged by the end of Thursday then it would no longer be a surprise", and so on backwards through the week.

Noun

unexpected hanging paradox

  1. A paradox about a person's expectations about the timing of a future event which they are told will occur at an unexpected time. It is based on the idea that a prisoner, told that he will be hanged on a day unknown to him, concludes that "I cannot be hanged on Friday because if I haven't been hanged by the end of Thursday then it would no longer be a surprise", and so on backwards through the week.
    Synonyms:
    hangman paradox

Synonyms of unexpected hanging paradox

Questions about unexpected hanging paradox

What does unexpected hanging paradox mean?
Unexpected hanging paradox means a paradox about a person's expectations about the timing of a future event which they are told will occur at an unexpected time. It is based on the idea that a prisoner, told that he will be hanged on a day unknown to him, concludes that "I cannot be hanged on Friday because if I haven't been hanged by the end of Thursday then it would no longer be a surprise", and so on backwards through the week.
What part of speech is unexpected hanging paradox?
Unexpected hanging paradox is a noun.

Words near unexpected hanging paradox in the dictionary

  1. unexpectancy
  2. unexpectant
  3. unexpectantly
  4. unexpectation
  5. unexpected
  6. unexpected hanging paradox
  7. unexpected red theory
  8. unexpectedly
  9. unexpectedness
  10. unexpecteds
  11. unexpecting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unexpected hanging paradox (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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