Find all of the listed words within the jumble of letters.
Words may appear horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, either forward or backward.
The best Word Sleuths use many techniques to achieve fast times when solving a word search puzzle. No single approach is sufficient to get the fastest time, but if you practice using them in tandem you'll quickly improve.
If you relax your focus and take in the letter jumble as a whole, you may find that some words just pop out at you. These will generally be the easiest words in the puzzle, but by ignoring the list you're effectively searching for all of the words at the same time.
This approach gets harder once you've highlighted a few words. The added visual noise interferes with your subconscious pattern recognition. Try to use this technique early, and focus on vertical or diagonal lines at first. Words appearing horizontally will be easier to find, so the visual noise is less disruptive.
Our brains recognize certain clusters of letters as a whole. Letter groups like "tion" or "ture" stand out but are unlikely to appear by chance. Searching for even small groups like "ee" or "oo" can help you skim a puzzle to quickly find the places a word might be hiding.
After you've found a few words, you'll notice that certain parts of the jumble are suspiciously empty. Your chances of finding a word in these areas are quite good.
You may also notice that certain areas of the grid have several words that all run in the same direction. Often you'll find even more words nearby that are oriented the same way. There are only so many ways that all the words will fit into the jumble, after all!
Think you've found a word, but the game isn't having it? Take a moment to check the letters before and after the word. Often there will be a prefix, a suffix, or both that makes it a completely different word. For instance, the word "activate" could actually be "activates," "deactivate," or "deactivated."
There are only a few dozen common prefixes and suffixes in the English language, and they tend to stand out. It's usually quicker to check around a root word you've found within the jumble rather than referring to the word list.
If you're not having any luck with the more relaxed techniques, it may be time to buckle down and focus. Choose a word from the list and start scanning for its first letter. Go row-by-row or column-by-column. Whenever you find the letter you're looking for, check all around it for the next letter in the word.
You don't have to use the first letter; sometimes choosing an unusual letter from the middle of the word works well. If the letter you're scanning for appears infrequently in the jumble, you won't spend as much time checking the surrounding letters.
Searching the whole grid for a letter is time-consuming. You'll make better use of that time if you have two or three words in mind that all share the letter you're looking for.
Your success with this approach is limited only by your memory. If you could remember every word in the list, you would only need to do a single pass through the jumble to find them all!
If you're not finding words with your current approach, try a different technique. Sometimes you'll fall into a rut and repeatedly overlook a letter. Highlighted areas can cause you to over-focus. Changing your strategy can help you find a way around these attentional blind spots.