Why a garden?

A word search is a quiet game. You stare at a block of letters until a word you know jumps out at you. That moment is the whole fun. The paper version gives you nothing back for it except a pencil line, so when we built ours we treated every hidden word as a seed.

Under the grid sits a strip of bare soil with one seed for each word. Find a word and a flower pops up there. Find them all and the garden is in full bloom, with a sun and a butterfly to show for it. The list you tick off becomes something you grow, and nobody wants a bare patch in the middle of their garden.

A bit of real word search history

The word search is younger than most people guess. The puzzle usually credited as the first ran on March 1, 1968, in the Selenby Digest, a free want-ad paper from Norman, Oklahoma. Its maker was Norman E. Gibat, whose printing company published the Digest. People picked it up at stores like Safeway, and Gibat wanted to make waiting in the grocery line a little more pleasant. Accounts say that first grid hid the names of Oklahoma cities and towns.

Teachers noticed fast. Several asked Gibat for copies for their students, and one teacher mailed copies to friends, relatives and teachers in other cities. The puzzle was never patented, so anyone could make one, and it spread under names like WordFind and WordSeek.

Gibat may not have been first, and the record admits it. In Spain, the puzzle maker Pedro Ocón de Oro published “sopas de letras,” which means letter soups, and some sources say he got there before 1968. There’s no record of when the first Spanish one ran, so the credit usually goes to Oklahoma.

The five gardens

There are 30 levels in five themed packs of six. Every level is the same puzzle each time you play it, so you can race your own best time.

• Garden Critters: an 8 by 8 grid with 5 words. Words only read left to right or top to bottom.
• Fruit Basket: 10 by 10 with 8 words. Words can now run diagonally, down and to the right.
• Colors: 10 by 10, with 8 or 9 words.
• Hawker Food: 12 by 12 with 10 or 11 words, from PRATA and SATAY to LAKSA, ROJAK and CHENDOL.
• Weather & Sky: 12 by 12 with 12 words, running in all eight directions, backwards too.

How to play

• Find each word from the list somewhere in the grid.
• Drag your finger or mouse from the first letter to the last. The line snaps to rows, columns and diagonals.
• Small fingers can tap instead. Tap the first letter, then tap the last letter.
• A found word gets a colored band, gets crossed off the list, and plants a flower in the garden.
• Stuck? Hint flashes the first letter of a word you haven’t found yet. You get 3 hints per level.
• Finish a level to unlock the next one. Your best time for each level saves on this device.
• On a keyboard, use the arrow keys to move and Enter to pick the first and last letter.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.

Tips

Hunt for the odd letter. A K, Y or Z stands out in a grid. Look for the K in ROJAK or the Y in SATAY before you look for the first letter.

Sweep one row at a time. Run your eyes along each row, then down each column. Slow, but it never misses.

Save your hints for the end. The last one or two words are always the hardest. A hint shows you where a word starts, so it’s worth the most when only a couple are left.

Read backwards in the last pack. In Weather & Sky, words can run right to left or bottom to top. If one won’t show up, flip it in your head. RAIN becomes NIAR.

Your turn

The first garden is at the top of this page, with five seeds in the soil. Scroll up, find the words, and watch it grow.