Clueless Word Search

A word search that keeps its list to itself

An ordinary word search hands you the answers and asks you to find them. A clueless word search takes the answers away. All you get is a theme and a row of blanks for each hidden word, so before you can hunt for a word you have to think of it.

That makes it two puzzles in one. The first happens in your head: which colours, or pets, or capital cities could be in there? The second is the familiar one, running your eye along the rows until the letters line up. Find a word and it writes itself into its blanks, so the list you were never given builds up as you go.

The blanks tell you more than you'd think

Every row of blanks is one word, and the number beside it counts its letters. Start by matching lengths to the theme. Under Days and months, a nine-letter word can only be Wednesday or September, because nothing else in the calendar is that long. A three-letter colour is almost certainly red.

A gap in the blanks means two words. In Pets, a row marked (6, 3) is a six-letter word followed by a three-letter one, which narrows it down to a small, squeaky animal that is neither from Guinea nor a pig. On Easy, each row also starts with the word's first letter. Medium and Hard give you blanks and nothing else.

When a word won't come, Letter writes its next letter into the blanks, one press at a time. Hint works on the grid instead, flashing the square where a hidden word begins. You can also work the other way round: scan the grid for a run of letters that looks like a word, then count them and check there is a row of blanks the right length.

Every grid is checked before you see it

An ordinary word search fills its spare squares with random letters, and every so often those letters spell something. Short words do it most. Of the 224 accidental words in our test grids, 166 were only three letters long, and BAT, CAT and MAP turned up more than any others. With a list in front of you that hardly matters. Without one, you would find a real word from the theme and watch the game refuse it.

So every clueless grid is checked, and one that fails is thrown away and dealt again: on Hard, about one grid in nine. The check has two rules. Each hidden word is in the grid exactly once, and no other word from the theme is in it at all. It has to allow one thing, because nothing can be done about it: a short word sitting inside a longer hidden one.

You don't pick the theme, and it decides how hard it is

Every new puzzle on this page takes one of the site's 476 topics at random, so colours might be followed by Greek gods or The Simpsons. The theme matters more than the difficulty buttons do. Those only change the grid: bigger, with diagonal words on Medium and backwards ones on Hard. The theme changes how many answers you have to choose from.

There are only seven days in a week and twelve months in a year, so under Days and months you already know nearly every answer before you start. US states has fifty. Countries has 193, counting the members of the United Nations, and a grid hides only a handful of them. If a theme is too much, press New and another one arrives.

To stay on one theme, follow Play only this theme above the grid. It opens that topic's own page with the puzzle already in Clueless mode. Every topic page has the same switch: open Ancient Egypt or dinosaurs, set Mode to Clueless, and the word list turns into blanks.

Remembering a word is harder than spotting it

Finding a word you can see on a list is recognition. Clueless asks for recall: you have to pull the word out of your own memory first. Recall is the harder of the two, and it is also the one that makes things stick. Psychologists call this the testing effect, and it is why a quick quiz usually teaches more than reading your notes again.

So a clueless puzzle makes a good end-of-topic check. A class that has just studied the Tudors or the water cycle can open that topic's page, switch its Mode to Clueless and download the pack: the theme, the grid and blanks to write on, with the words listed on the answer key. An Easy pack prints each word's first letter, as on screen. The class has to remember the words and then spell them, because the blanks count every letter. For an ordinary puzzle from your own vocabulary list, use Make Your Own Word Search, and for a different kind of twist try the detective word search, where one word on the list is missing from the grid on purpose. All four kinds are compared on types of word search.