Word Search

Word Search — how to play and tips

A classic word find puzzle. Every word on the list is hidden somewhere in the grid — running left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, or along any of the four diagonals. Find them all and the puzzle is done. Each new game generates a fresh grid and picks a fresh theme, so no two puzzles play out the same way even if you replay the same size right after finishing one.

How to play

Drag from a word's first letter to its last letter and release. Found words highlight in green on the grid and get struck through in the list below, so you always know at a glance what's left. Words can be selected in either direction — start from the last letter and drag toward the first and it counts just the same — so you don't need to work out which end is the start before you commit to a drag.

Your drag doesn't have to be perfectly straight — the selection is snapped onto the nearest of the eight legal directions from wherever you started, so a slightly wobbly finger or a mouse drag that wanders a few pixels off-line still picks out exactly the line you meant. This matters more than it sounds, because on a small phone screen a truly straight eight-letter diagonal drag is hard to pull off by hand, and the snapping is what keeps the game feeling precise rather than fiddly.

Themes and sizes

Each puzzle picks one of six themes at random — Animals, Food, Nature, Space, Sports or Music — so the word list always hangs together conceptually rather than being a random grab-bag of unrelated words. Within a theme, the word pool is large enough that even puzzles of the same size and theme won't always show the same set of words. 10×10 hides 8 words and makes a fast, casual round; 13×13 hides 11 words and is the default middle ground; 15×15 hides 14 words and takes noticeably longer to clear, both because there's more grid to scan and because longer words are more likely to appear. Best completion times are tracked and saved separately for each of the three sizes, so switching sizes doesn't erase your record on the size you were previously playing.

Every listed word really is in the grid

Words are placed by trying random positions and directions, and a placement is only accepted if every letter it overlaps already matches — this is how words end up legitimately crossing and sharing letters on the board rather than just sitting side by side. If a word can't be fitted after many attempts, the entire grid is thrown away and regenerated from scratch, rather than quietly dropping that word from the board while leaving it visible on the list. That means an unfindable word simply can't appear on a finished puzzle — if it's printed in the word list, it is guaranteed to be somewhere in the grid, so getting stuck always means looking harder, never a broken puzzle.

Timing and sharing your result

A timer starts the moment a puzzle begins and keeps running until the last word is found, and it only advances while you're actively playing. When you clear the board, your time, word count and grid size are shown together, and a Share Result button lets you copy or share a short summary of the run — handy for comparing times with someone else on the same size and theme. Beating your saved best time for that grid size triggers a small on-screen callout, which is the only real "win condition" beyond simply finding every word.

Tips

Scan for unusual letters first. Words with a Q, X, Z or J are far quicker to spot than ones made of common letters, because the filler letters that pad out empty grid cells rarely cluster the same way real words do. Work one direction at a time — sweeping every row left to right, then every column top to bottom — rather than hunting randomly across the whole grid at once. Save the diagonals for last; they're the hardest direction for the eye to track, so it's worth clearing the easy horizontal and vertical directions first to narrow down where the remaining words can possibly be. It also helps to read the word list before you start scanning rather than searching for one word at a time — holding several target words in mind lets you recognize any of them the instant your eye crosses a matching letter.