word = ["h","e","l","l","o"] len1 = len(word) blanks = ["_","_","_","_","_"] print ''.join(word) print ' '.join(blanks) def lb(): guess = raw_input("Choose a letter. ") count1 = 0 ...

i copy and pasted from another place so i don't know how or why it looks the way it does...

while count1 <= len1 is a classical 'off by one' logical error Subscript out of range means you are trying to access the array variable "word" out of it's original range you declared it for. ...