Boost Your Skills: Essential Tips to Help with Word Puzzles

Word puzzles, such as scrambles, jumbles and word searches are becoming increasingly popular. With the variety of challenges and improvement in cognitive function they can provide, it's not hard to see why.

Of course, with so many people playing and loving word puzzles the question of how they can improve their game is a common one. The good news is you can find a whole range of essential word game tips that will help you improve your performance and boost your skills. Just keep reading to find out what they are.

1. Word Puzzle Tips

First of all, let's look at some simple word puzzle tips that will help you boost your game.

Be sure to first scan the grid

This advice works for just about any word puzzle apart from a riddle and is especially applicable to word searches. Scanning the grid before you begin to focus on the words or clues will give you a much better idea of where or what the words might be. When completing a word jumble be sure that you let words pop out at you as you can find many this way, even before you know precisely what you are looking for.

Look for letters that are less frequently used

Some letters in the alphabet are used more than others. Vowels for example are frequent in common usage. However, other letters such as J, Q, X and Z (consonants) are used a lot less. This is good news for those of us doing word puzzles because we can use these less frequently used letters to our advantage. All we have to do when playing word searches is look for words we want to find that contain these letters. Since they are used less, there will be less of them in the grid, so when you do find one it's more likely to belong to the word you are looking for. If you do find that it isn't just carry on searching for the letter. You can save a great deal of time and effort this way. Of course, it does rely on the words you are searching for containing these letters. If they do not, then you’ll need to use one of the other methods listed below.

2. Improve Your Word Game Skills

For those looking to improve their word game skills, there are plenty of things that you can do.

Practice

The first and probably the most simple and fun strategy is to practice, practice, practice. After all, when we do something regularly our brains become very efficient at it, and so our performance will become more accurate and faster.

Happily, it couldn’t be easier to practice fun word searches because they are available for free online. You don't even have to make an account to play and can choose from one of four levels of difficulty, with the expert online word jumble level including more words and backwards words that will test your brain.

Read more

The extensiveness of your vocabulary is something that can help improve your performance when it comes to word games. The good news is that you can boost your vocabulary by reading more. The trick here is to not only read things you usually would, but also expand your horizons and take in a variety of materials from contemporary news articles, to the classics. In this way, you will come across the broadest range of words and then you will be familiar with them if they come up in a puzzle.

3. Solving Puzzle Words

Having trouble solving your word puzzle? Well, you are not alone. Even the most advanced puzzler can sometimes get in a position where they just can't solve that last clue! Strangely the advice here may sound counter intuitive, but can work very effectively. This advice is to put the puzzle down, step away and focus on doing something else, something totally unrelated.

Shifting your focus in this way can give your brain a break, which allows it to be better rested and so more open to finding the answer. Then when you come back to the puzzle you are essentially doing so with ‘fresh eyes’.

4. Mastering Word Challenges

Use a guide

For those who want to become a master of word challenges, one of the easiest but most effective things you can do to upgrade your word puzzling to master level is to use a physical guide as you solve it.

What we mean here is something with a flat edge like a ruler or bookmark that allows you to go down the rows of letters systematically. Using such a tool can help your focus, and assist you in separating each row of letters which you can then go through systematically looking for the stars of the words on your list.

5. Expert Strategies for Word Games

Experts play fast and efficient word games, and use the following strategy to facilitate this:

Look for letter pairs

To solve your wordsearch in the most efficient and expert way possible, always look out for letter pairs. The easiest way to do this is to find the first two letters of the word you are searching for and then look for these in the grid.

For example, if I was searching for the word BATH, I would first look for a B, and then look in the squares above, below, to the side, and diagonally for an A. If there was no A then I would move on to another B. However if there was an A, I would then repeat the process around this letter looking for a T and so on.

6. Finding Answers for Puzzle Words

If you need a quick fix to help you find the answer in a word puzzle, then looking out for double letters may just be the solution you need. First go down your list of words and identify any with double letters such as Tattoo, voodoo, Hawaii, and Fuss. If you find that some words have double letters then just look for the letter in the grid and then check all the surrounding squares for the same letter again.

7. Boost Your Word Puzzle Performance

Last of all, if you are committed to boosting your word puzzle performance, then learning about prefixes and suffixes can be particularly helpful. Indeed, when you are searching for a word with a suffix it's often much easier to locate that suffix like ING or ED than it is to source the rest of the word.

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