Find every hidden word in the grid.
Themed boards from animals to outer space. Easy boards read across and down; hard ones hide words in all eight directions, backwards included.
A word search is a square of letters with a list of words hidden inside it. Every word on the list is in there somewhere, written in a straight line, and the job is to find each one and mark it. The words on each board share a theme — animals, the weather, things in the kitchen — so the list itself is a small clue to what the letters around it might be spelling.
There is no way to lose and no penalty for a wrong guess. The clock runs while you play, so the challenge is finding every word, then finding them faster next time.
Each word is written in a straight line: along a row, down a column, or on a diagonal, with its letters next to each other and nothing in between. Words can cross, sharing a letter where they meet, and every other square is filled with letters that are there to throw you off.
Mark a word by selecting it from its first letter to its last. If the letters you selected are one of the words on the list, a coloured band goes through it on the board and the word is crossed off the list. When every word is crossed off, the board is solved.
The difficulty changes three things: how big the board is, how many words are hidden, and which directions they can run.
Scanning the board at random and hoping a word jumps out works on an easy board and stops working quickly after that.
Daily mode gives everybody the same board on the same day, with a new one at midnight in your own time zone. It follows the week: easy on Monday and Tuesday, medium from Wednesday to Friday, and hard at the weekend. The themes take turns, so every theme comes round once before any theme comes round twice.
Finishing the daily adds to your streak, and the result can be shared without giving the board away: it says which day it was, the difficulty, the theme and your time.
Every board is generated in your browser. The words for the theme are shuffled and the longest are laid down first, because they have the fewest places they can go. A word is allowed to cross another only where the two share a letter.
The gaps are then filled with letters drawn from the hidden words themselves rather than from the whole alphabet. That makes the filler look like the words, which is what makes a word search a search. Finally the finished board is read back in all eight directions, and it is thrown away if any word can be found in two places, so every word you find is the word the game hid.