How to play
The board holds a square of letters with a set of themed words buried inside it. A word occupies a straight run of cells — across, down or along a diagonal — and the letters it does not use are filler. To claim a word, press on its first letter, slide to its last letter and release. The run highlights as you move, so you can see whether the line you are tracing is the one you meant. Release on the correct final letter and the word is crossed off the list beside the grid.
Words are allowed to cross each other. If two words share a letter, that single cell belongs to both, which is why a grid can feel denser than the word count suggests. Nothing is hidden by trickery: no word bends around a corner, no word skips a cell, and the list is never padded with entries that are not really there.
Controls
- Mouse or finger: press on the first letter, drag along the word, release on the last letter. Releasing on the wrong cell simply clears the highlight and costs you nothing.
- Keyboard: the arrow keys move between cells, Enter marks the first letter, and Enter again on the final letter submits the run. Esc cancels a selection you started by mistake.
- Theme swaps the word list. 10 × 10 hides eight words, 14 × 14 hides twelve.
- Relaxed and Tough control direction. Relaxed keeps every word reading forwards; Tough allows the reverses, so a word may read right to left or bottom to top.
- New grid deals a fresh board with the same settings and resets the clock, which starts on your first selection rather than on page load.
Every cell announces its row, column and letter to a screen reader, so the grid can be worked through by ear as well as by eye.
Two ways to search, and when each one wins
Almost everyone searches the same way at first: eyes wander across the board hoping a word jumps out. It works, slowly, and it is the reason a ten by ten grid can eat five minutes. There are two disciplined methods that beat wandering, and they are good at different things.
The first-letter scan takes one word from the list, fixes its opening letter in mind, and sweeps the grid looking only for that letter. Every hit is a candidate, and at each hit you check the eight neighbours for the second letter — usually a fraction of a second, because most candidates die immediately. This is the method to use when the word starts with something rare. In a Kitchen grid, hunting the K of KETTLE is quick work, because K appears perhaps twice in a hundred cells. Hunting the S of SIEVE is miserable, because S is everywhere.
The row sweep ignores the list entirely. You read one row at a time, left to right, then the columns, then the diagonals, and you let any word announce itself. It feels slower but it finds several words per pass instead of one, and it never wastes effort on a word that happens to be hard to spot. Sweeping is the better method on a full board at the start of a round, and the first-letter scan is the better method at the end, when three stubborn words remain and most of the grid is already crossed out.
Whichever you use, take the longest words first. This is not a matter of taste. A long word covers more cells, so it is statistically easier to bump into, and it constrains where it can sit: an eight-letter word in a ten-wide grid has only three possible starting columns on a horizontal line, and far fewer diagonal placements than a four-letter word. Finding COLANDER early also crosses off letters that shorten every later search. Working from the bottom of the list upward, from short to long, is the most common way to make an easy grid feel hard.
One more habit worth stealing from people who solve these quickly: when Tough is on, do not search backwards as a separate pass. Read each row in both directions at once by scanning for the word's rarest letter rather than its first, then look outward in both directions from every hit. The Z in BLIZZARD or the J in JETTY does the work that a first letter cannot.
What follows are estimates taken while we were testing this board, and they are not records of anything. A ten by ten Relaxed grid with eight words usually runs two to four minutes on a first attempt and closer to ninety seconds once the sweeping habit is in place. Fourteen by fourteen with twelve words tends to take five to nine minutes. Turning Tough on adds roughly a third to whatever your Relaxed time was, and the last two words reliably cost more than the first six put together.
Where the puzzle came from
The word search is a young puzzle by comparison with crosswords. The form is generally credited to Norman E. Gibat, who published one in the Selenby Digest in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1968. The Digest was a free classified-advertising paper, and the puzzle was a way of keeping readers on the page; local teachers asked for copies for their classrooms, and the idea spread from there into newspapers and then into puzzle books, where it has stayed ever since.
What kept it alive is that it needs almost nothing to work: a square of letters, a list, and a pencil. It survives translation, it survives being printed badly, and it is one of the few puzzles that a beginner and an expert can enjoy on the same page at different speeds. Our version keeps that simplicity and changes only what a screen can genuinely improve: the highlight that follows your finger, and a clock you are free to ignore.
The filler letters deserve a word of their own. Drawing them uniformly from A to Z would be the obvious approach and a bad one, because a real English word sitting in a sea of Q, X and Z is visible from across the room. The empty cells here are drawn from the letter frequencies of written English, so E, T, A, O and N dominate and the hidden words have somewhere to hide.
Questions players ask
Can a word on the list be missing from the grid?
No. The grid is built first and the list is written from what was actually placed, so every entry beside the board is genuinely in the letters.
Which directions do the words run in?
Relaxed uses across, down and the two forward diagonals. Tough adds all four reverses, so words may read right to left or bottom to top.
Why is the filler not random letters?
A uniform draw would produce a board full of Q and Z, and the hidden words would stand out at once. The filler follows English letter frequencies instead.
Where is my best time stored?
In this browser only, under a key starting with bg: that pairs the theme with the
grid size. Clearing your browsing data removes it.