How to play Wend
Wend is a word puzzle on a five by five grid. A few squares are blocked out, and hidden among the letters are between four and seven words, from three to eight letters long. Three rules decide how they fit:
- The rows under the board show how many words there are and how long each one is.
- Each word is traced through squares that touch edge to edge. Diagonals do not count, and the path may bend as often as it likes.
- Every letter belongs to exactly one word. Nothing is left over and nothing is shared.
Drag across the letters to trace a word, or tap them one at a time, then let go to submit. Tap any letter of a word you have found to take it back. The blocked squares are fixed before you start, and they are what make the puzzle work: they carve the grid into shapes only one set of words can wind through.
Tips for beginners
- The longest word first. It is the most constrained, so it has far fewer places to hide than the short ones.
- Watch the corners. A letter tucked in a corner or against the blocks has only one or two ways in, so whichever word claims it is nearly decided already.
- Count what is left. A clever word that strands a single letter with no neighbours is the wrong word, however good it looks.
- Unusual letters are signposts. A J, Q, V or Z has very few words it can belong to, so start there.
- Never guess. Every board here is checked to have exactly one set of words. If nothing fits, one of the words you have found is in the wrong place.
Where Wend comes from
Wend belongs to the word search family, where the fun is spotting words hidden in a block of letters.
- 1968 The word search Norman E. Gibat publishes a grid of hidden words in the Selenby Digest, a small advertising paper in Norman, Oklahoma.
- 1972 Boggle A word game that makes words from letters that touch each other in a grid.
- Today Wend Words wind through touching squares, and every letter is used exactly once, so the whole grid is the answer.
- Also known as
- Word path puzzle
- Puzzle family
- Word search
- Our board
- 5 by 5, four to seven words
- What it trains
- Seeing words in jumbled letters
Did you know? Gibat's first word search hid the names of towns in Oklahoma.
Is this the same as LinkedIn's puzzle?
No. This is our own Wend, in the same trace the words style. Every board is generated here and checked against our word list to have exactly one set of words, so the answers will not match any official daily answer. The same word list is used by the game itself, so a word it accepts is a word the puzzle knows. It is free, needs no account, and your streak is saved in your own browser.