I tapped the grid at random — and a word lit up green
My finger slipped across the screen, I brushed two letters — and suddenly the whole line flashed green. The first word found itself while I was still aiming.
A grid where eyes scatter
I open Word Search. A mess of letters in front of me, a list on the side: find and cross out. It looks simpler than simple, yet for the first minutes I just slid my eyes along the rows and saw nothing. The letters blurred. A familiar word hid right under my nose while I read the grid like a normal page — left to right, line by line. That is not how words get found.
The accidental line
That random tap changed my tactic. I marked the first letter and the last one — the line between them lit up the whole word. It turned out you hunt directions, not letters. Words here lie horizontally, vertically and diagonally, in any direction, including bottom-to-top and right-to-left. I started sweeping my eyes along the diagonal like a flashlight beam instead of reading rows. The second word popped out almost at once: it ran up a diagonal, where I had never even looked.
One word dug in
After that things moved fast: word after word turned green and got crossed off the list. One was left. I combed every row and column — nothing. For five minutes I circled the grid and started suspecting an earlier mistake. Then I remembered the reversed directions and slowly traced the right edge from bottom to top. There it was: a short word wedged between two long ones, reading backwards. Click the first letter, click the last — green flash. Victory.
What I do differently now
In every new grid I now sweep the diagonals and reversed directions first, leaving rows for later. A strange habit, but the last word almost always sits right there.