How to play word search

Every puzzle has two parts: a square grid of letters and a list of words. Each word on the list is hidden somewhere in the grid, written in a straight line with no gaps. All the other squares are filler letters chosen at random. You win when you have found and marked every word on the list.

A few rules hold in every puzzle on this site:

• A word always runs in a straight line: across, down, up or diagonally. It never bends or skips a square.
• Each listed word appears exactly once. If you think you see it twice, one of the two is missing a letter.
• Words can cross and share a letter, so a square that is already highlighted can belong to another word too.
• Which directions are used depends on the level, from two directions on easy to all eight on hard and expert.

Once you spot a word, mark it from its first letter to its last. There are three ways to do that:

• Drag. Press on the first letter and drag to the last one with your finger, mouse or pen. A see-through capsule follows you and snaps to the nearest straight direction, so a slightly wobbly drag still works.
• Tap twice. Tap the first letter, then tap the last letter. This is easier on small phones and for long diagonal words.
• Keyboard. Move around the grid with the arrow keys, press Enter or Space on the first letter, move to the last letter and press it again. Esc cancels a selection.

If the letters you marked spell a word on the list, it gets a colored capsule in the grid and is crossed off the list. If not, the selection simply disappears; there is no penalty for trying. You can select a word from either end: dragging from the last letter back to the first counts too.

On the medium level, words read forward in four directions: across (→), down (↓), diagonally down to the right (↘) and diagonally up to the right (↗). This grid has one word in each of them. FROG runs across the top, BEAR runs down the left edge, LION goes diagonally down from the third row, and DEER climbs diagonally up from the bottom row.

The easy level uses only the first two, across and down, which makes it a good place to learn. The diagonals are the ones people miss most often, because our eyes are used to reading in rows.

From the hard level up, and in the daily puzzle, words can also run in the four reverse directions: right to left (←), bottom to top (↑) and both diagonals read backwards (↖ ↙). In the grid below, WOLF reads from right to left in the second row, OWL reads upwards in the first column, SEAL climbs from the bottom-right corner toward the top left, and MOLE runs diagonally down to the left.

Backwards words are hard to see because they do not look like words. A useful trick is to spell the word in reverse before you search: look for FLOW instead of WOLF, LWO instead of OWL. Read the second row of the grid from left to right and you will find FLOW sitting there.

Words often share a letter where they cross. Here SNOW and WIND share the W, and WIND and RAIN share the I. When you find one word, look at the words that might cross it: a highlighted letter is still available to other words.

If a word will not show itself, tap or click it in the word list. A hint comes in two steps:

1. The first tap makes the word's first letter flash in the grid. Now you know where it starts.
2. A second tap on the same word also lights up its second letter, which tells you the direction. From there you can follow the line to the end.

In the example below, FROG and BEAR are found and DEER has had both hint steps: the D in the bottom row and the E diagonally above it are lit, so the word must climb up and to the right. LION has not been found yet.

Hints are free to use, but they are counted. The result screen shows how many you used, and your statistics keep a separate count of puzzles solved without any hint.

On the expert level the list does not show the words. Each word appears as a row of blanks, one per letter, and fills in only when you find it. You are looking for any real word of the right length, read in any of the eight directions. Hints work the same way as on other levels. The expert page has advice for this kind of search.

The timer is off unless you switch it on in Settings. When it is on, the clock starts with the puzzle and stops when the last word is found. The result screen shows the words you found, your hints and your time, and offers a new game. You can share your result as a short message with a link that opens the same puzzle for a friend.

Statistics are kept for each level, for theme puzzles and for the daily puzzle: games played and completed, best and average time, hint-free solves, and for the daily puzzle your current and longest streak. They are stored in your browser on this device. An unfinished puzzle is saved as you play, so you can close the page and continue later.

The Settings window lets you change the language, switch to a dark theme, turn on high-contrast colors for the highlights, and turn the timer on or off. Until you choose, the site follows your device's light or dark setting. New players see a short interactive tutorial with a real mini puzzle; you can replay it at any time from Help or Settings.

The easy level has an 8×8 grid with six words, medium a 10×10 grid with ten, hard a 13×13 grid with fifteen and expert a 15×15 grid with twenty. The daily puzzle is a 12×12 themed grid with twelve words in all eight directions. Besides these you can play any of the 30 themes, print puzzles or make your own in the maker. Ready to get faster? Read our word search tips.