Help me design a game!

I'm building a web based game- think similar to hangman. A player will guess letters that will load as they get them right. Now, there's maybe 500 possible words and I'm not sure how long a session will last. Should I just load this data in a static file with the webpage or should I make an API call to get the words? It seems a bit overkill for something like this to make API calls per word but I'm open to different approaches. Any advice would be helpful! TIA!