Word Search tips: how to find every word faster

Every puzzle is a square grid of letters and a list of words on one theme, like Garden or Vegetables. Each word is hidden in the grid once, in a straight line with no gaps. Drag from its first letter to its last, or from its last to its first, and it's coloured in and crossed off the list. Find every word to solve the puzzle.

Our grids go from 6 x 6 to 10 x 10 letters, with 4 to 10 words to find. There are 200 levels in 5 tiers of 40, from Warm-up to Expert, and each tier adds one new thing. A new Word Search comes out every day at 00:00 UTC (5:30 in the morning in India), from Monday 16 November.

The letters that aren't part of a word are filler, picked by how often each letter is used in English. So the words don't stand out by their letters: E and T are everywhere, and Q and Z hardly ever turn up.

Most people scan the grid for a word's first letter. That's often the slowest way. Because the filler follows English, common letters turn up all over the grid and rare ones hardly at all. On our grids, E is 11.7 of every 100 letters, A 7.9 and T 7.5, against 1.5 for K, 1 for V and 0.3 for Z.

So before you look, pick the word's least common letter. For ZEBRA, look for the Z, not the E or the A. Find each one in the grid, then check the letters around it, all eight ways, for the rest of the word.

We counted this on all 200 of our levels. A word's first letter is in 4.4 places on its grid on average, and the letter of the word that's rarest on that grid is in 2.4. On the 40 Expert levels it's 5.4 against 2.9. For 62.5% of all the words, the rarest letter is in the grid only once or twice, so when you find it you've nearly found the word.

Words get harder to spot as the levels go up, because they run more ways. Whichever way a word runs, you can drag it from either end.

• Levels 1 to 40 (Warm-up): across and down only. In our levels, 45.5% of these words run across and 54.5% down.
• From level 41 (Getting going): slanting down to the right as well. A quarter of the words in levels 41 to 80 (25%) slant.
• From level 81 (Thinking cap): backwards (right to left) and up too. In levels 81 to 120, 10.4% of words run backwards and 11.1% up.
• From level 121 (Word wizard and Expert): every way, slants that go up or backwards included. Only about 2 words in 5 run across or down there (40% in Word wizard, 40.6% in Expert).

A word that runs backwards or up is the hardest to see, because your eyes read it the wrong way round. Spell it back to front in your head first: CAT becomes TAC, so look for a T with an A after it, then a C.

It helps to read the grid in lines. Go along each row both ways, then each column both ways, then the slants. Line by line, you check every place once, instead of looking at the same corner three times and missing another.

On levels 1 to 160, no two words share a letter. Once a letter is coloured, it can't be part of another word on the list, so skip it and look only at what's left. Every word you find makes the next one easier.

From level 161 (Expert), words can cross: two words may share one letter, never more. All 40 of our Expert levels have at least one crossing. So on those, a coloured letter can still be the start, middle or end of another word.

Once you've found every word on the list, one more is hiding: the bonus word. It isn't on the list, but it fits the same theme, so ask yourself what else belongs. If the list was all fruit, it's another fruit.

The bonus word never uses a letter of a word on the list: our checker turns down any puzzle where it does. So look only at the letters nothing has coloured. That's 48.3% of the grid on our levels, 47.2 of the 100 letters on an Expert grid. The bonus is 3 to 8 letters long and runs the same ways as that level's words.

On a level, the bonus turns 2 stars into 3: 30 XP instead of 20 the first time you solve it, and 6 coins instead of 4. On the daily, it's a ⭐ on your result and in what you share.

💡 Hint shows where a word starts. It costs 10 coins and never lowers your XP or stars. It picks the first word on the list you haven't found, so it's worth most near the end, when one hint finishes the puzzle. A hint you bought on a level stays bought, so it's free if you play that level again.

Show me ends the puzzle and shows where every word was. Today's puzzle still gives you 10 XP. A level you solve after seeing its answer gets 1 star at most, for good, so try a hint first.

On a level, Skip (30 coins) shows you the answer and opens the next level. The skipped level stays open, and you can come back to solve it for 1 star. You earn coins by playing: a solved Word Search daily pays 15, and a level pays 2 coins for each star the first time you solve it, unless you saw its answer first.

A new Word Search comes out every day at 00:00 UTC (5:30 in the morning in India), from Monday 16 November. It's the same grid for everyone, and there's no timer: it stays today's puzzle until 00:00 UTC.

Each day's grid comes from one of the five tiers. After its first two weeks, which climb slowly from Warm-up to Thinking cap, Monday's is the easiest (Warm-up or Getting going) and the weekend's the hardest: Saturday's is Word wizard, and Sunday's Word wizard or Expert.

It’s free in your browser, with no sign-up. Play the 200 Word Search levels, or the daily Word Search, a new one every day from Monday 16 November.

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