What is a natural term for the "partial word" in a game of hangman?

Halfway through a game of hangman, the piece of paper you are playing on might look something like this (omitting the partial drawing of the hanged man).

_AN_MAN
Guessed letters: EASTNRM

What is a natural term to use for the "partial word" _AN_MAN? I have tried googling, but to no avail. I am looking for a single word or short phrase that would be understood by anybody, and is less clumsy than "partial word". In my head I've been calling _AN_MAN the board, similar to how I suppose you might call a particular arrangement of chess pieces on a chess board "the board", but I do not think this would be immediately understood/considered natural.

Example sentence:

After guessing seven letters, the _____ was _AN_MAN.

Several word finder websites allow you to find a word based on partial information; they would list HANGMAN, SANDMAN etc. as the options for the input _AN_MAN.

Some of them, e.g. this one call the input a word pattern.

(The sites generally offer more options than necessary for Hangman; a blank in Hangman is always only one character, similar to the ? wildcard.)