Letter Grid Hunt

How to play

Tap a letter to start a word, then tap letters that touch the last one. Tap the last letter again to step back. You can also press and drag across the grid, and letting go takes the word.

Enter takes the word, Escape clears the trace, Backspace removes the last letter. Every square is a real button, so a keyboard works too.

Rules and controls — Zerdly's preset

• Words follow squares that touch, including diagonally.
• A square cannot be used twice in one word — a letter can. Two different squares holding the same letter are two different squares.
• The minimum length is set by the preset, and nothing under 3 letters counts anywhere.
• A word scores the sum of its letters, and rarer letters are worth more. There is no length table; length pays because longer words have more letters.
• Re-tracing a word you already have costs nothing and is not a mistake — the game just says you have it.
• When the round ends you are shown every word that was on the grid and how much of it you took.

Presets

• 2-minute Sprint — A 4x4 grid, three letters or more, two minutes on the clock. Find as much as you can before the time goes.
• Untimed Explore — The same size grid with no clock at all and a four-letter minimum. A different question about the same board: not how fast, but how deep.
• 5x5 Expert — Twenty-five letters, four letters or more, three minutes. More board than anyone finishes, which is the point.
• Daily Grid — One grid a day, the same for everybody, built from the date. Two minutes, three letters or more.

Tips

• Look for the awkward letters first. A J, Q, X or Z is worth several ordinary letters, so a short word built on one often beats a long word built on vowels.
• Work the endings. Once you have found a word, try it again with an S, an ED or an ING if the letters are there — they are usually adjacent to where you already were.
• Trace with the corners in mind. A corner square has only three neighbours, so words that use one are scarcer and easier to miss.
• Remember that a letter can repeat. Doubled letters — TOOT, SEES, ALLOT — are the finds people walk past most often.
• In Untimed Explore there is no reason to rush, so work one region of the grid at a time rather than skimming the whole thing.

Leaving in the middle of a round

A timed round remembers how much time was left, not when it was due to end. Close the tab and the clock stops with it; come back and you have the time you had.

That is a deliberate choice. Scores are kept on this device and there is no leaderboard, so the only thing the stricter behaviour would achieve is punishing a phone call or a flat battery.

Privacy and local play

Everything runs in your browser. Your current grid, your settings, your best scores and the grids you have seen recently are kept on this device only, and the button under the board clears them without touching any other Zerdly tool. No account, no sign-in, and nothing about your play leaves the machine you are on.

Questions

Can I use the same letter twice in one word?

Yes — as long as it is two different squares. The rule is that a SQUARE cannot be reused, not a letter. On a grid with two Os and two Ts, TOOT is a perfectly legal find, and it is the one most people never try because they assume the opposite.

Which squares count as touching?

All eight around a square: up, down, left, right and the four diagonals. A square in the middle of the grid has eight neighbours, one on an edge has five and a corner has three. Words never wrap around the edges.

How are words scored?

A word is worth the sum of its letters, and rarer letters are worth more. There is no length table — length pays because a longer word has more letters in it. That means a short awkward word can beat a long ordinary one: QUARTZ is worth more than STARERS despite being shorter.

Where do the letter values come from?

They were counted, not chosen. Each letter's value is worked out from how often it appears across the word list this game uses, so the rarest letters are worth the most. There are no fives and no nines in the set, which is what a measured table looks like — the gaps are simply where no letter falls.

How are the grids made?

Letters are drawn independently, weighted by how common each one is in the same word list — so vowels turn up about as often as they do in real words. Nothing guarantees a good grid on its own, so every candidate is solved before you see it and thrown away if it does not hold enough words. The grid you get has been checked.

What is the shortest word I can find?

Three letters in the 2-minute Sprint and the Daily Grid, four in Untimed Explore and 5x5 Expert. Nothing shorter than 3 letters counts anywhere, whatever the preset — a grid is thick with accidental two-letter pairs, and a game where AN and OF are worth finding is a game about noticing rather than about words.

What happens if I close the tab in the middle of a timed round?

The clock stops with it. A timed round remembers how much time was LEFT rather than when it was due to end, so you come back to the time you had. That is deliberate: your scores are kept on this device and there is no leaderboard, so there is nothing to protect by punishing a phone call or a dropped connection.

Untimed Explore is just the Sprint with no clock, isn't it?

It is a different question about the same board. Removing the clock changes what you do — you stop skimming for three-letter words and start working a corner — so the minimum length goes up to four to match. Sprint asks how many you can spot in two minutes; Explore asks how much of the grid you can actually take.

Do I see the words I missed?

Yes, every one of them, sorted by what they were worth, along with how much of the grid's total you took. They appear only after the round ends, for the obvious reason: the list is the complete answer key.

Where does the word list come from?

It is the same 28,000-word common English list Zerdly's Word Scramble uses, built from a public-domain word list and ranked for commonness against a freely licensed frequency list. Nothing was purchased and nothing was scraped, and the same list checks your words and finds the ones you missed — so the game can never accept a word it would not have found itself.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. The word list, the solver and your progress all run in your browser. There is no account, and clearing this game's data leaves every other Zerdly tool untouched.

Related interactives

• Word Guess — one hidden word, a letter at a time.
• Word Scramble — the same dictionary, with the letters loose in front of you.
• Word Search — a grid where you are told what to look for.
• Crossword — clues, squares and a grid that checks itself.