How to play word search: a beginner's guide

Daily Word Search is the classic grid-of-letters puzzle. Every day you get a themed list of words and a square grid of letters. The words are hidden inside the grid — your job is to find and select every one. When the last word is selected, the puzzle locks in automatically.

The eight directions

A word can run in any of eight straight lines from its first letter:

• Across — left to right, or right to left.
• Down — top to bottom, or bottom to top.
• Diagonally — down-right, down-left, up-right, or up-left.

Words never bend. Every letter of a hidden word sits on the same straight line as the letter before it, one cell away.

Selecting a word

There are two ways to pick out a word once you've spotted it:

• Drag it. Click (or touch) the first letter, keep holding, and drag to the last letter. The cells underneath highlight as you go. Release on the last letter to lock the word in.
• Click the endpoints. Click the first letter, then click the last letter. If the two cells line up in one of the eight legal directions, the word between them is selected.

Direction doesn't matter — you can select from start to end or end to start. The puzzle checks both orderings, so a word written backwards in the grid is just as easy to claim.

The list on the side

The word list below the grid is your checklist. Once a word is found it's crossed off the list and its cells stay highlighted on the grid. The remaining words are the ones still hiding.

When the puzzle solves

You don't press a submit button. The moment every word on the list is crossed off, the puzzle auto-completes. If you select letters that don't form a word on the list, nothing happens — try again, no penalty.

Ready to get faster? Once you've played a few, our Word search tips post walks through the pattern-spotting tricks that turn a slow scan into a confident sweep.