Word search tips and strategies

Most players look at the first word on the list and start hunting. It works, but it is rarely the fastest way. The list is in no particular order, and the words on it are not equally easy to find. Spend a few seconds sorting them in your head first:

• Words with rare letters. A word containing J, K, Q, V, X or Z is usually the quickest find of all, because that letter appears only a few times in the grid.
• Words with double letters. Two identical letters side by side, like the EE in QUEEN or the PP in APPLE, stand out more than you might expect.
• Long words. A long word gives your eyes many chances to catch part of it, and it often crosses several other words.
• Short words last. Three- and four-letter words made of common letters are the hardest. Leave them until the grid is mostly highlighted and there are fewer places for them to hide.

You do not have to look for a word's first letter. Look for its least common letter, then check around it. In the grid below there is only one Z, one Q and one X. ZEBRA has already been found by spotting its Z and reading down. QUEEN is in the second row from the bottom, and BOX climbs diagonally from the bottom-left corner.

RBUSOZDIOTNYECTTLINBELHDRSRBVPXSUADLOQUEENBIYNIRC

Words to find

• ZEBRA
• QUEEN
• BOX

The same trick works with less exotic letters. In English word lists, letters like E, A, R, S, T and N are everywhere, while B, F, G, H, M, P, W and Y are less common. If a word has one of them, search for that letter first. Once you find it, check all eight neighbors for the letter that comes next or before it in the word.

Experienced players tend to use one of a few systematic scans rather than letting their eyes wander. Try each and keep the one that suits you.

• Row by row. Move your eyes along each row from left to right, looking for one target letter only. Do not try to look for several words at once; one letter at a time is faster.
• Look for pairs, not single letters. Searching for two letters together, such as the "QU" of QUEEN or the "ZE" of ZEBRA, filters out most false starts, because the pair is much rarer than either letter alone.
• Column by column. After a pass along the rows, do a pass down the columns. Vertical words are surprisingly easy to miss when you only read across.
• Follow your finger. On a phone or tablet, slowly trace the row you are reading with a finger just above the screen, without touching. It keeps your place and stops you from skipping a line.
• Zoom out. When you are stuck, lean back and look at the whole grid at once. Long words sometimes jump out from a distance that you could not see up close.

On the hard and expert levels and in the daily puzzle, words can run backwards. Your brain is very good at recognizing words that read forward and quite bad at recognizing reversed ones, so the best tactic is to search for the reversed spelling. Instead of TIGER, look for REGIT; instead of HORSE, look for ESROH going down.

IREGITEAMSFESRDLNSRENNNROYYYAEHRSUCP

Words to find

• TIGER
• HORSE
• PANDA

Here TIGER sits in the top row, reading from right to left, and HORSE reads upwards in the first column. PANDA is still hidden. It runs diagonally from the bottom-right corner up toward the top left, so the reversed ADNAP reads down to the right from the second row. Start from its rarest letter, the P or the D, and check the diagonal neighbors.

Diagonal words are the ones players miss most, on every level that has them. A few habits help:

• When you find a candidate letter, always check the four diagonal neighbors, not just left, right, up and down.
• Only the longest diagonals, the ones that start near a corner, have room for a long word. When a long diagonal word is missing, check the lines that begin close to the corners.
• Try reading a diagonal line deliberately, square by square, from one edge to the other. It feels slow, but it finds words your eyes skip.

Every found word tells you something. Words cross, so the letters of a found word are good starting points for the next one: check whether any remaining word shares a letter with it. As the grid fills with highlights, the unmarked letters become the more likely hiding places. Near the end, look at the clusters of letters that no word has touched yet; the last word is often there.

If one word refuses to appear after a careful scan, move on and come back. A fresh look a minute later often finds it straight away. And if you are truly stuck, a hint is there for a reason: the first step only shows where the word starts, which still leaves you the satisfaction of finding the rest. See how hints work.

If you want to get faster, switch the timer on in Settings and stick to one level for a while. Your statistics show your best and average times for each level, so you can see whether a new scanning method really helps. A few ideas:

• Measure averages, not records. A single fast game can be luck. An average that drops over a week means your scanning is getting better.
• Try one method per session. Play five games looking for rare letters first, then five scanning row by row, and compare.
• Go hint-free. Your statistics count puzzles solved without hints. Make that number grow before you chase the clock.
• Use the daily puzzle as a benchmark. The daily puzzle always has the same size and the same number of words, which makes it a fair yardstick from day to day.

When hard starts to feel easy, the expert level adds a new skill: finding words without knowing what they are.