Word Search

What is the rule for word search?

Rules: The player needs to find the given word along the horizontal, vertical or diagonal direction.

Is there a trick to doing word searches?

  1. Search for less common letters in a word, such as J, B, K, Q, X, Y, or Z. This strategy makes the rest of the word easier to find.
  2. Don’t forget about diagonals. This is especially true if the word is spelled backwards and diagonally!
  3. Look for words letter by letter. To find a word in the list, look for only the first letter of the word as you scan the rows in top-to-bottom order. When you find the first letter of the word, scan around to see if the second letter of the word is also there. If not, continue searching line by line.
    For example, if you are looking for the word “home”, you would start scanning for the letter “H”. After you find an “H”, look around and see if there is an “O” next to it in any direction.
  4. Watch out for 2 consecutive same letters. Some words will have pairs of letters. For example, if you are looking for the word “Troops”, you can scan for pairs of Os. Your brain can easily find double O’s because they will stand out in your brain when you try to search for them in a sea of mixed letters.

How long does it take the average person to do a word search?

On average the seek time is 30.5347 seconds.

This search time could be reduced to 16.675 seconds when participants were familiar with the word search environment. (John M. Henderson, Myriam Chanceaux, and Tim J. Smith. 2009. The influence of clutter on real-world scene search: Evidence from search efficiency and eye movements. Journal of Vision 9, 1 (Jan. 2009). )