Word Scout: start with a distinctive pair of letters

Search for a feature, not a whole picture

A word-search grid is easier to inspect when you know exactly what counts as evidence. Each target in Word Scout occupies a straight line. It may read horizontally, vertically or diagonally, and it may run backwards. You are looking for a sequence of adjacent letters with an unchanged direction, not a winding route through familiar characters.

Take RIVER as a teaching example. Searching only for R may leave several plausible starts. Searching for an adjacent R and I immediately reduces the work. Once that pair has a direction, the next three letters must continue along the same line. There is no reason to inspect every neighbour of the V: the first two letters have already fixed the direction.

Reject a candidate as soon as it breaks

Suppose R and I lie diagonally down and right. The next square in that direction contains a T. That candidate fails, even if a V is visible just above it. Changing direction would create a bent word, which these rules do not accept. Stop checking that candidate and look for another R–I pair. A quick rejection is useful information, not wasted effort.

An edge can rule out a candidate before you read every letter. If a five-letter target starts two squares from the boundary and points toward it, there is not enough room. Check the available length first. On the larger boards this simple filter saves attention because a promising pair may otherwise tempt you to follow letters that cannot fit.

Use the list to organize a second pass

After finding a word, its list entry gains a check and its accepted line is highlighted. Choose a remaining target with a distinctive middle pair, such as the double T in PATTERN. A pair in the middle works too: inspect both directions from it while keeping the spelling order straight. You do not need to begin every search at a word's first letter.

Overlap is allowed. A highlighted letter may still belong to a different target, so do not mentally remove found lines from the grid. Also, filler can accidentally create another occurrence of a target. This implementation accepts any actual straight occurrence with the correct spelling; you are not required to guess which copy the placement process originally intended.

Make the endpoint selection deliberate

Once you have checked the entire line, select its two ends. Either order works. If the first endpoint is wrong, select it again or press Escape before choosing another. Undo removes the last accepted word while preserving earlier ones; overlapping letters may therefore stay highlighted. Restart keeps the current letters but clears the found list. New puzzle starts another arrangement, so use Restart when you want to practice a more systematic scan on the same grid.