Word Search
Mouse and keyboard
- Press on a letter and drag along the word, then release.
- The run snaps to the nearest straight line through the letter you started on.
Touch
- Press and drag with one finger; the highlight follows and snaps to a line.
- Tap Hint to mark the first letter of a word you have not found.
This panel
- F full screen
- M sound on or off
- ? this list
- Esc close, or leave full screen
- The clock stops while the board is off screen
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Your record
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| Board | Played | Won | Drawn | Win rate | Best | Fastest | Best run |
|---|
Awards for Word Search
- Eagle eye Clear a word search without taking a hint. Needs: no hints Locked
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About Word Search
Drag along the word. Eight directions once you are good.
A word search is a scanning game rather than a thinking one, and the fastest players do not read the grid at all — they hunt for one unusual letter and let the word assemble itself around it.
The three sizes here are genuinely different puzzles: four directions on the small grid is a gentle read, while sixteen words hidden in all eight directions on a fifteen-wide grid is a real search.
Also searched for as
- word find
- word seek
- wordsearch puzzle
- find the words
Whichever name you know it by, it is the same game: it runs in this browser, with no download and no sign-up.
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How to play Word Search
- Find every word in the list inside the grid of letters.
- Press on the first letter of a word and drag along it — across, down or diagonally. The highlight snaps to the straight line you are closest to, so you do not have to trace it exactly.
- Let go on the last letter. A correct word keeps a coloured capsule on the grid and is struck through in the list; a wrong one shakes and clears.
- Easy is a ten-by-ten grid with eight words hidden in four directions. Medium is twelve-by-twelve with twelve words in six directions. Hard is fifteen-by-fifteen with sixteen words in all eight, backwards included.
- The clock starts on your first press and stops when the last word is found.
Strategy that actually helps
- Hunt letters, not words. Pick the rarest letter in a word — a J, K, Q, X or Z first, otherwise a G or B — and scan for it; the eye finds one shape far faster than it reads a whole grid.
- Work the edges on the hard grid. Long words have to start within their own length of an edge, so a nine-letter word in a fifteen-wide grid can only begin in a narrow band.
- Scan in one direction at a time. Reading every row left to right, then every column, then the diagonals, is faster than looking everywhere at once, because each pass only asks your eye for one thing.
- Cross off doubles. A word with a double letter (LL, SS, EE) shows as a repeated pair in the grid and is the easiest kind to spot from a distance.
- Use the hint on the word you have given up on, not the first one you are stuck on — it marks a first letter, and that is worth most on a long word.
Controls
Mouse and keyboard
- Press on a letter and drag along the word, then release.
- The run snaps to the nearest straight line through the letter you started on.
Touch
- Press and drag with one finger; the highlight follows and snaps to a line.
- Tap Hint to mark the first letter of a word you have not found.