🔠 Word Hunt
🔤 Word · 1 playsWord Hunt
Trace words through neighbouring letters before the clock runs down.
About Word Hunt
A grid of letters, a timer, and a simple compact: any word of three letters or more that can be traced through touching tiles — sideways, up and down, or diagonally — scores, with each tile used at most once per word. The board always contains far more words than any solver finds, which is what makes the exercise durable; the skill is systematic rather than inspired, working prefixes and endings off every promising cluster. Finding STONE should immediately suggest TONES and NOTES, and a solver who milks each discovery for its anagrams and extensions will double the score of one who hunts each word cold.
How to Play
Drag through adjacent letters, in any of the eight directions, to spell a word of three letters or more. A tile may be used only once within a single word. Longer words score steeply more, and the round ends when the timer does.
💡 Tips & Strategy
Work clusters, not sweeps. Scanning the whole grid for inspiration wastes the clock; instead pick a dense corner — ideally around an S, R or T — and mine it: every word that region holds, then the next region. The tiles that touch the most neighbours are the centre cells; the corners touch only three, so words through the middle are simply more numerous.
Milk every word you find. STONE contains TONE, TONES, NOTE, NOTES, ONSET — anagrams and subwords trace through the same cluster with the path barely changed, and re-tracing a known route with one different ending is the fastest scoring in the game. Every -S, -ED, -ER and -ING adjacent to a found word is nearly free.
Let the board's hooks organise the hunt: find the letter pairs that begin many words — ST, CH, BR, PR — and test each against its neighbours. Diagonals count, and the eye habitually under-uses them; deliberately checking the diagonal neighbours of a promising pair turns up the words other solvers miss.
Spend the clock unevenly. The first minute should be all short words from habit, banked without thought; the middle of the round is for the systematic cluster work; the last stretch is the wrong time to hunt seven-letter glories, and the right time to sweep for the plurals and past tenses you skipped. Length pays steeply, but only the long words you actually find.