How to play Word Hunt
Word Hunt is a themed word search. Every word on the list is hidden somewhere in a grid of letters, running in any of eight directions and reading either forwards or backwards. A new themed 10×10 puzzle arrives each day, and Practice lets you choose the board size — 8×8, 10×10, 12×12, or 14×14 — and the difficulty.
Make your own Word Hunt puzzle and share it with a link.
How to play
- Find every word in the list, hidden in the grid.
- Words run in any of eight directions — across, down, or diagonally — and can read forwards or backwards.
- Select a word by dragging from its first letter to its last, by tapping the first letter and then the last, or with the arrow keys and Enter at each end.
- A correct line marks the word as found and crosses it off the list. Press Escape to clear a selection you started.
- In Practice, pick a board size and a difficulty. Easy hides words only left-to-right and top-to-bottom, Medium adds backwards words, and Hard uses all eight directions with filler letters drawn from the answers themselves.
- Stuck? Use a hint to reveal where one unfound word begins — three per puzzle, or two on Hard.
Tips & strategy
- Use the theme. Knowing what the words have in common tells you what letters to look for.
- Hunt distinctive letters first. There are far fewer Qs, Zs, Js, and Xs in the grid than vowels.
- Scan for a word’s first two letters as a pair rather than a single letter — it cuts the false positives dramatically.
- Work the diagonals deliberately. They are the directions most players skip, so that is where the last few words usually hide.
- Start on Easy if a big board looks daunting. Every word reads normally there, so a 14×14 Easy grid is far gentler than a 10×10 Hard one.
- Save your hints for the end. Once only one or two words remain, a hint saves far more time than it does early on.
Accessibility
Words can be selected with the keyboard as well as by dragging or tapping both ends, and the word list and found state are read as text.