Word Search Difficulty Levels: What Changes From Easy to Hard

A word search gets harder in three ways: a bigger grid, more directions, and more decoys. On Poozee's Word Search, Easy is a 10×10 grid whose words only run across or down, Medium is 12×12 and adds diagonals, and Hard is 15×15 with words in all eight directions, half of them backward. The words themselves hardly change: they average about 6.4 to 6.5 letters at every level.

What really changes is how much you have to check. If you hunt each word by its first letter, an Easy puzzle has about 43 lines to read, a Medium one 160 and a Hard one 728, about 17 times as many as Easy. Here's where that comes from, and how to play each level.

Easy, Medium and Hard at a glance

The last two rows are explained below. In short, almost everything piles up from Easy to Hard except word length, and the step from Medium to Hard is the bigger of the two.

How we measured

We generated 1,800 puzzles exactly as the game does: 600 per level, 50 for each of its 12 themes, from the same word lists at every level. Then we counted what each puzzle asks of you, word by word.

We can't time how fast you read, so we counted something you can feel instead: lines to check. Say you're hunting TIGER by its T. Every T in the grid is a place to stop, and from each one you look along every direction the level allows, but only where there's room for all five letters before the edge. Each of those is one line to check. A near miss is a line where the first two letters (or more) match, like TI, and then the word breaks off. Puzzle books and other sites build grids their own way, so treat the exact numbers as a guide to our three levels.

What makes a word search hard

Three things pile up from level to level: directions, backward words and decoys. One thing you might expect to change, the words themselves, doesn't.

More directions, more lines

The biggest change between levels is the number of directions. Easy words run 2 ways, Medium 4 and Hard 8, and every extra direction is another line to read from every candidate letter. The grid grows too, so each letter shows up more often: a word's first letter fills 5.2 squares on an average Easy grid, 7.3 on Medium and 10.8 on Hard.

Put together, a word has about 93 places it could be hiding on Easy (a start square and a direction where it fits), 249 on Medium and 948 on Hard, about ten times as many. Hunting by first letter, that's 5.4 lines to check per word on Easy, 13.4 on Medium and 45.5 on Hard.

Words that run backward or upward

You've spent your life reading left to right and top to bottom, and Easy never asks anything else. Medium adds the two forward diagonals, so a quarter of its words (25%) run on a slant, and the ones on the up-right diagonal read upward: 12% of Medium words. Hard allows everything: 50% of its words run backward (right to left, bottom to top, or backward on a diagonal), and 32% read upward.

A backward word is hard because the line doesn't look like the word when you read it the normal way. RHINO running backward reads ONIHR to your eye.

Decoys and near misses

Every extra copy of a word's first letter is a decoy, and some of them line up with the next letter too. These near misses are what make a Hard grid feel like it's full of words that aren't there. An Easy puzzle has 2.7 of them on average. A Medium puzzle has 11.3, and a Hard one has 50.7, about three for every word on the list. Near misses that match three letters or more are rarer: 0.2 per Easy puzzle, 0.9 per Medium and 3.6 per Hard.

What doesn't change

The word lists are the same at every level, so word length isn't what makes Hard hard: 6.4 letters on Easy, 6.5 on Medium and 6.5 on Hard. Only the longest words differ, because a word has to fit the grid: up to 10 letters on Easy, 12 on Medium and 13 on Hard.

The amount of grid per word barely changes either. Easy has 12.5 squares per word and Medium 12.0, so Medium is actually a little more crowded. Hard has 14.1, with more filler (58%) to hide its words in. Words also cross more as the levels go up, sharing 3.1 squares per Easy puzzle, 6.0 per Medium and 8.5 per Hard, so a square you've already used is more and more likely to be part of a second word.

Easy: check only right and down

On Easy, every word starts at its first letter and runs right or down. That's a big shortcut if you use it. Checking all eight directions from every first letter would mean 15.1 lines per word; checking only right and down, where there's room, cuts that to 5.4, 64% fewer.

The "where there's room" part matters as much as the direction. About half (49%) of the right and down lines from a first letter run into the edge before the word could finish, so you can skip them without looking.

The same rule makes long words the easiest targets. A 9-letter word on Easy can only start in the first two columns or the first two rows, so a word of 8 letters or more has just 3.2 lines to check on average, against 7.7 for a word of 3 or 4 letters. Start with the longest words and save the short ones for last.

Medium: four directions, never backward

Medium adds the two diagonals that read left to right: down-right and up-right. It never reads right to left, so every word's first letter is to the left of its last letter unless the word runs straight down. From each first letter, check right, down, down-right and up-right, and ignore everything to the left.

That still cuts the work nearly in half: 25.3 lines per word in all eight directions against 13.4 in Medium's four, 47% fewer. Most words still run straight, so sweep across and down before the diagonals.

Expect about one near miss per word on Medium (0.9). When the first two letters line up, read the rest before you drag.

Hard: all eight directions, half of them backward

On Hard, every direction is open, so there's no direction to skip. What still works is the room rule: 47% of the lines from a first letter hit the edge before the word could end, and you can skip those at a glance.

Because half the words run backward, a word's last letter is as good a place to start as its first. If you hunt by an end letter, take whichever is less common in English: the rarer of the two fills 9.5 squares on an average Hard grid, against 10.8 for the first letter. The word's rarest letter anywhere is better still, at 6.3. When you find the word, drag from either end: the game accepts a word selected from last letter to first.

With about 50 near misses per puzzle, Hard is where wrong drags happen. A drag that isn't a word costs nothing but time, but reading to the last letter before you let go is quicker than starting over. If you're stuck, Hint lights up the first letter of a word you haven't found, though on Hard you still have to look in every direction from it.

For tips that work at every level, like hunting a word's rarest letter and spotting double letters, see our word search tips.

How to pick a level

1. Start on Easy if you're new to word searches or playing with a beginning reader. Every word reads the way you read a book, and a puzzle has only 8 words.
2. Move to Medium once you can finish Easy puzzles without pressing Hint. It's the gentlest step up: no backward words, and only about a quarter of words on a slant.
3. Try Hard when Medium feels routine. It's the biggest jump: about 4.5 times Medium's lines to check per puzzle, and backward words for the first time.
4. Compare times within a level only. The game keeps a separate best time for Easy, Medium and Hard, because a Hard grid isn't the same puzzle made bigger.

Making puzzles for a class or a family game night? Our guide on how to make a word search shows how to set the grid size, word count and directions for the solver you have in mind.

Keep playing

• Play Word Search on Easy, Medium or Hard, with 12 themes
• Word search tips: how to find words faster, at any level
• How to make a word search: grid size, word count and checks
• Word Guess, a daily five-letter word puzzle
• Nonograms for beginners, another puzzle that starts gentle and scales up