How to play
You get a grid of letters and a list of words hidden inside it. You have to find them all. Every word runs in a straight line — horizontal, vertical or diagonal — and can go in either direction, so some are written backwards.
To mark one, tap its first letter and then its last. If the line between the two matches a word on the list, it stays marked in green and the word is crossed off. If you pick the wrong first letter, Esc cancels the selection.
Four ways to go faster
1. Hunt the rare letter, not the first one
The commonest mistake is combing the grid for the word's initial letter. That is the worst possible choice when the letter is an A, an E or an S, because there are dozens. Look at the word and hunt its least common letter: the K in KIWI, the J in JIGSAW, the Z in ZEBRA. There will be two or three in the whole grid, and from each you can check eight directions in a second.
2. Hunt letter pairs, not single letters
English has combinations that essentially only occur inside a real word: QU, TH, CH, SH, CK, and endings like -TION or -NESS. Spotting a QU in the grid is practically spotting a word.
3. Sweep one direction at a time
Trying to see all eight directions at once is tiring and does not work. It is faster to make one pass looking only at horizontals, then only at verticals, and leave the diagonals for last: they hide the fewest words and cost the most to see.
4. Save the backwards diagonals for the end
A word running up a diagonal and written backwards is by far the hardest to spot. If you have one word left and it will not appear, it is almost certainly like that. Start from its last letter instead of its first and try the four diagonals.
About the sizes
There are three: 10×10, 12×12 and 14×14. The real difference is not the number of words, it is the amount of filler: a 14×14 grid holds nearly twice the noise, and that is what makes it hard. The hard level also tends to run ten words per grid instead of eight.
The themes and the words are the same ones the app uses, so if you play both, the content lines up.
Why plain A to Z
It is a deliberate decision and worth explaining. The grid uses a single 26-letter alphabet with no accented characters, because the search compares letter by letter. If the grid mixed accented and plain forms, finding a word would depend on which variant happened to land in each cell, and anyone seeing the plain letter where they expected the accented one would walk straight past it. With one alphabet, what you see is what there is.
A badly made word search shows immediately
The classic failure of automatically generated grids is that a word on the list is not there. It happens when the placer cannot fit it and carries on without saying so. And it is especially cruel, because the player has no way of knowing whether they are searching badly or searching for something that does not exist: they spend ten minutes combing the grid for nothing.
That cannot happen here. As each grid is generated the words are searched for one by one in all eight directions, and if any is missing, that grid is not published. The same check runs again afterwards over the published file, which is the one this page loads.