Word search tricks: seven that actually change your time
Why you should hunt a letter and not a word, which letters to anchor on in English, and the diagonal sweep that finds in two minutes what you missed for ten.
A word search looks like the puzzle with no technique to it: you look, you find, you cross off. But there is an enormous difference between solving a grid in twelve minutes and solving it in four, and it has nothing to do with eyesight. It has to do with what you look for and the order in which you cover the grid.
These are the seven things that change the pace.
1. Hunt the letter, not the word
The basic mistake is trying to see the whole word. Your brain cannot scan a grid looking for BUTTERFLY: that is nine letters and too much information at once.
What it can do, and very fast, is look for a single letter. Take one letter of the word and sweep the grid for it. Every time you find it, check only the eight surrounding cells to see whether any holds the next letter. If not, move on.
It is counter-intuitive because it looks like more work. It is far less: you swap a complex pattern-recognition problem for a trivial one that runs almost automatically.
2. Anchor on the rare letters
Better still: do not look for the first letter, look for the least frequent letter in the word.
In English the rare letters are Q, J, Z, X, K, V, W, Y. If the word is JIGSAW, do not hunt the J because it comes first: hunt it because in a 15×15 grid there may only be three or four Js. Checking four places is infinitely faster than checking the forty Es.
For words made only of common letters, anchor on the least frequent combination: in LETTER, look for the double T. In QUARTZ, the QU is practically a free hit — Q is almost always followed by U, so the pair behaves as a single rare marker.
Other combinations worth anchoring on in English: CK, PH, TH at the start of a word, SH, WH and any double consonant.
3. Sweep in one direction, and finish the sweep
Many people wander the grid: a bit at the top, a bit in the middle, back to the corner. That way you check the same areas three times and leave others unlooked at.
Pick a pattern and be disciplined: column by column, left to right, or row by row top to bottom. Finish the whole sweep before moving to the next word. It sounds rigid, and it is exactly what stops you repeating work.
Columns tend to work better than rows, for a curious reason: you are so trained to read horizontally that sweeping a row makes your brain try to read it as text, and it gets distracted. Vertically that does not happen.
4. Diagonals, separately
Diagonal words are the most stubborn, because reading diagonally is something you never do. And because they are stubborn, people leave them for last, when they are already tired.
Turn it round: once you have half the grid done and the hard words are left, do a sweep dedicated to diagonals alone. Start in the top left corner and run the diagonals one by one, as if they were rows in another script. You will find in two minutes what you had spent ten failing to see.
Another shortcut: turn the sheet 45 degrees (or the phone, or your head). The diagonals become horizontals and your automatic reader starts working again.
5. And do not forget backwards
Almost every word search includes words written backwards: right to left, bottom to top, and diagonally in reverse. Eight directions in total.
The practical trick is not to think of them as «backwards» but to find the anchor letter and check the eight surrounding cells, without prejudging the direction. If you apply technique 1 properly, reversed words fall out just like normal ones, with no extra effort.
6. Use the letters you have already crossed off
Well-built grids cross their words: they share letters. Every word you cross off leaves you a map of confirmed letters, and that is free information.
If you still need a word starting with A and you can see an A that is part of an already-solved word, look at it: it is as good a candidate as any, and tight grids reuse cells more than you would expect.
7. Do the long words first
The opposite of what it seems. Long words are the easiest: they take up more cells, there are far fewer positions where they fit, and they almost always contain some rare letter. And crossing them off leaves the grid much clearer for the short ones.
Four and five letter words are the genuinely hard ones, because they fit anywhere. Leave them for the end, once half the grid is marked.
The summary, in order
- Sort the word list from longest to shortest.
- For each word, identify its rarest letter or combination.
- Sweep the grid column by column looking only for that letter.
- At each occurrence, check the eight neighbours.
- When only the hard ones remain, do a diagonal sweep.
Does practice help?
With word searches, a lot and fast: it is a visual search task, and visual search responds very well to training. Two weeks of one grid a day and the time drops strikingly.
What you should not expect is for that to carry over elsewhere. You will be faster at finding words in grids, and somewhat faster at similar search tasks; that is where it ends. If the topic interests you, we cover it in more detail and without hype in what the science says.
And if you simply want to practise, MenteBrillante gives you a new grid every day alongside fourteen other puzzles, free in the browser with nothing to install. There are also free word searches with no sign-up and a word search maker for building your own.