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How to play word search, and find words faster
A word search is a grid of letters with a list of words hidden inside it. Each word runs in a straight line: across, down, diagonally, and on harder puzzles backwards. Find a word, mark it, cross it off the list, and you're done when the list is empty.
The rules
- Every word on the list is hidden in the grid once, spelled in a straight line with no gaps and no bends.
- Words can cross each other and share a letter where they cross.
- Spaces, apostrophes and hyphens are left out. "New York" is hidden as NEWYORK and "Mother's Day" as MOTHERSDAY.
- Letters that aren't part of any word are filler. They're there to make the words harder to see.
- There's no penalty for a wrong guess and no time limit. The timer on our game is only there if you like to beat your best.
How hard a puzzle is comes down to three things: the size of the grid, how many words there are, and which directions they can run. Here's how our levels set them.
| Level | Grid | Words | Words run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 10 by 10 | 10 | across (left to right) and down |
| Medium | 12 by 12 | 14 | across, down and corner to corner, never backwards |
| Hard | 15 by 15 | up to 18 | in all eight directions, backwards included |
Hard has "up to" because two themes, the US states A to I and O to W, have fewer than 18 words. We also never put a word in the same puzzle as a longer word that contains it.
Marking a word on this site
- Tap the first letter. It gets a yellow mark and the line above the grid tells you what to do next.
- Tap the last letter. If the letters between the two spell a word on the list, a colored band covers it and the word is crossed off. Starting from the last letter works too.
- Or drag from one end of the word to the other with a finger or the mouse. The band snaps to the nearest straight line, so a slightly wobbly drag still lands.
If something doesn't count, a red message says why. "Not in a straight line" means the two letters you tapped can't be the ends of one word; your first letter stays picked so you can try the second tap again. "Not a word on the list" spells out the letters you picked, so you can see which one was off. To let go of a first letter, tap it again.
On a keyboard, the arrow keys move around the grid, Enter picks a letter, Escape lets it go and H asks for a hint. Hint circles the first letter of a word you haven't found. You get 6 per puzzle, and pressing Hint again before you find that word repeats the same clue for free.
How to find words faster
Most people start by staring at the grid and waiting for a word to jump out. That works for the first few. After that, a method beats luck.
1. Look for the word's rarest letter first
Take Zinnia. Searching for its Z is quicker than searching for its N or I, because there are far fewer Zs to check. On our puzzles this works especially well. The filler letters are drawn in proportion to how often each letter turns up in ordinary English text, so E, T and A are everywhere while Q, Z, X and J almost never appear as filler. When a word has one of those, the few you see in the grid probably belong to a word. Wikipedia's word search article lists Q, J, X and Z as the letters to look for.
2. Spot double letters
Two of the same letter side by side stand out from a jumble of different ones. Mississippi has three pairs, Yellowstone has LL and Chickadee has EE. Find the pair, then check whether the letters around it continue the word. This is the other tip from the Wikipedia article.
3. Find the first letter, then check its eight neighbors
Say you're hunting for Robin. Find an R, then look at the eight squares touching it for an O. No O next to it? Move to the next R. Most starting letters fail at this step, and checking two letters is much faster than tracing a whole line from every R. Only when you find R and O together do you follow that direction to see if B, I and N come next.
4. Go after long words first and short ones last
A long word like Wheelbarrow stretches across most of a row, and long words are easier to spot, as the Wikipedia article notes. Short words like Oak or Fir are the hard ones, because a three-letter run is easy to miss among so many letters. Leave them for the end, when most of the grid is already covered by bands and there's less to look through. Our hint button picks the shortest word you haven't found for exactly this reason.
5. Sweep one line at a time
Eyes skip around when they scan a big grid. Slow it down: read along the first row, then the second, and so on, looking for any word's first letter. On paper, lay a ruler or an index card under the row you're reading. On a computer, after your first tap, moving the mouse shows a yellow line from that letter, which makes it easy to follow a row or diagonal.
6. On Hard, search backwards words by their last letter
A backwards word reads right to left or bottom to top, so its last letter is the one you meet first when you read the grid normally. Robin backwards reads NIBOR, so look for an N with an I next to it, then keep going in that direction for B, O and R. Picking an unusual pair from inside the word works in any direction, too. For Xylophone, look for X and Y touching.
7. Use the theme
Words in a theme often share letters. In the US states from K to N, four words start with NEW: New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York. Every NEW you spot is a likely start. Themes without shared chunks like that are where the rare-letter method earns its keep.
Playing on paper
Our printable large-print word search sheets put one puzzle on each page with the answer key on its own page. A highlighter shows up better than a pencil loop, and crossing words off as you go saves re-checking the list. The techniques above work the same.
Variations you may come across
- Hidden message: the letters left over after every word is found spell out a message. Some puzzles spell the message with words written backwards instead.
- Trivia: a question sits below the grid, and the answer is an extra word hidden in the grid but not on the list.
- Snaking: words can bend at a letter, at a right angle or sometimes at 45 degrees, instead of running straight.
- No list: harder puzzles leave out the word list, so you read every row and column forward and back.
Our puzzles are the classic kind: straight lines, with the list shown.
Where word searches came from
Wikipedia credits Norman E. Gibat with designing and publishing the word search in the Selenby Digest on March 1, 1968, in Norman, Oklahoma. Teachers there asked for reprints to use in class. The same article notes earlier claims: a Spanish puzzle maker, Pedro Ocón de Oro, is said to have published "sopas de letras" before then, and James Patrick Carr of Villa Grove, Illinois, likely made similar puzzles, called "Slate R Straight", earlier too.
Sources
- Wikipedia, "Word search" (history, solving tips and variations), read October 2026.
- Wikipedia, "List of national parks of the United States" (used to check our national parks theme), read October 2026.
Ready? Play large-print word search online, or try today's daily word search.
Keep playing
- Play word searchLarge letters, three levels, a new grid every time.
- Daily word searchThe same puzzle for everyone today, with a streak.
- Printable word searchLarge-print sheets with answer keys, one or five at a time.
- All word search themesEvery theme and its full word list, ready to play or print.
- SudokuBig numbers, four levels and a daily puzzle.
- Printable sudokuLarge-print sudoku sheets with answers.
- CryptogramsCrack the letter code to reveal a famous saying.