Word Search — Free Online Fitness Word Puzzle

How to Play Word Search

Every round hides a list of words inside a square block of letters. Your job is to find all of them. Drag your finger or mouse from the first letter of a word to its last letter, and the line lights up as you go; let go on the right letter and the word locks in with a coloured highlight and gets struck off the list below the grid. If dragging is fiddly on a small phone, tap the first letter, then tap the last letter instead — both methods do exactly the same thing.

Words run in straight lines only, but a straight line can be horizontal, vertical or diagonal, and on the hardest setting it can also run backwards. Two words are allowed to cross and share a letter, and when they do, both stay highlighted — the board keeps a per-letter record of what has been found rather than painting one word over another.

A wrong selection costs you nothing but a shake of the grid, so there is no penalty for guessing. If you get properly stuck, the hint button outlines the first letter of a word you have not found yet. You get three hints per puzzle and each one adds fifteen seconds to your clock, which matters if you are chasing a best time.

Difficulty & Grid Sizes

• Easy — 8×8, 6 words. Words run left-to-right and top-to-bottom only. Nothing is reversed and nothing is diagonal. A good warm-up and the right setting for kids.
• Medium — 11×11, 9 words. Adds both forward diagonals, so a word can climb up-right or drop down-right across the grid. Still nothing reads backwards.
• Hard — 14×14, 12 words. All eight directions are live, which means words can read right-to-left, bottom-to-top and along backwards diagonals. Scanning column by column stops working here.

The Word Banks

Each puzzle is drawn from one of five themed banks of 22 words, and every round takes a fresh random selection, so the same bank never gives you the same grid twice.

Nutrition

The vocabulary of a food label: PROTEIN, CALORIE, FIBER, VITAMIN, OMEGA, CARBS, MINERAL, SODIUM, CALCIUM, IRON, ZINC, MACRO, GLUCOSE, STARCH, SUGAR, NUTRIENT, COLLAGEN, POTASSIUM, MAGNESIUM, FOLATE, PROBIOTIC and LEUCINE.

Exercises

Movements you would actually program into a session: SQUAT, DEADLIFT, LUNGE, PLANK, BURPEE, ROWING, PRESS, CURL, CRUNCH, PULLUP, PUSHUP, SPRINT, JOGGING, CYCLING, STRETCH, SITUP, CHINUP, THRUSTER, SNATCH, CLEAN, SKIPPING and BRIDGE.

Gym Equipment

What is on the floor of a decent gym: BARBELL, KETTLEBELL, TREADMILL, DUMBBELL, BENCH, RACK, ROPE, BANDS, PLATES, CABLE, ROWER, PULLEY, WEIGHTS, CHALK, GLOVES, STRAPS, MEDBALL, SANDBAG, ELLIPTICAL, SPINBIKE, COLLAR and BOXJUMP.

Healthy Foods

Things worth putting on the plate: SPINACH, QUINOA, SALMON, AVOCADO, BROCCOLI, KALE, ALMONDS, BERRIES, OATS, LENTILS, YOGURT, EGGS, TOFU, BEANS, CHIA, WALNUTS, TUNA, CARROT, BANANA, PEPPERS, CABBAGE and CHICKPEA.

Wellness

The parts of training nobody photographs: SLEEP, HYDRATION, RECOVERY, MOBILITY, STRETCH, REST, BALANCE, POSTURE, BREATH, ENERGY, FOCUS, HABIT, ROUTINE, STAMINA, STRENGTH, MINDSET, WALKING, SUNLIGHT, MASSAGE, SAUNA, STREAK and WELLNESS.

2-Player Pass and Play

Switch the mode to 2-Player and the same grid becomes a race between two people sharing one device. Turns alternate with a thirty-second timer running down as a bar under the names. On your turn you may find one word: land it and you score a point per letter — so KETTLEBELL is worth ten and OATS is worth four — and the device passes over. Let the clock run out and the turn passes with nothing scored. Wrong guesses do not end your turn, so keep hunting until the bar empties.

Found words are colour-coded by who found them, which means the finished board is also the scorecard: at a glance you can see which half of the grid each player owned. When the last word goes, the higher total wins. Names are optional and are remembered on your device for the next game.

Strategies & Tips

Hunt for rare letters, not for words

Scanning the grid for whole words is slow. Scanning for the unusual first letters is fast. In these banks that means looking for Q (QUINOA), Z (ZINC), Y (YOGURT), K (KALE, KETTLEBELL) and J (BOXJUMP) — there are only a handful of each in the grid and one of them is almost always the start of a word.

Work the list, not the board

Pick the longest unfound word first. Long words touch more of the grid, are harder to hide, and once placed they carve the board into smaller regions where the short words become obvious. On Hard, DEADLIFT and ELLIPTICAL usually fall before BENCH does.

Doubled letters are a giveaway

BARBELL, DUMBBELL, KETTLEBELL, PULLUP and PRESS all contain a double letter. A repeated pair sitting side by side, stacked vertically or on a diagonal is one of the quickest visual patterns to spot, and it narrows a long word down to two possible positions.

On Hard, read every line twice

With all eight directions live, half the words read the wrong way round. The cheap fix is to scan each row and column in both directions, or to look for the word's last letter as well as its first. A backwards TREADMILL is invisible if you are only looking for a T.

Spend hints late, not early

A hint outlines the first letter of a word you have not found, and it costs fifteen seconds. Early on you would probably have found that word anyway; at the end, when one word is left and you have swept the grid twice, fifteen seconds is far cheaper than another two minutes of scanning.

Use the crossings

Words share letters. Every word you find is also free information about its neighbours: a locked-in highlight tells you which cells are already spoken for and, more usefully, which letters in them are doing double duty. Late in a puzzle the remaining word almost always threads through something you already found.