Hard Word Search
Fifteen county names from across Britain are hidden in the grid above, on a fifteen by fifteen board with every direction in play. Roughly half of them are written backwards, upwards, or back along a diagonal, which is what the top setting actually means.
What makes a word search hard is the direction set
Not the number of words, and not the size of the board. A grid has eight straight lines running out of any cell, and a difficulty setting is simply how many of them the generator is allowed to use. The easy setting uses two, across to the right and straight down. The middle setting adds the two diagonals that also travel rightwards, so every word still begins at its leftmost or topmost letter. This page uses all eight, which is those same four lines read the other way round.
That is a measurable difference rather than a label. Over three hundred boards built at this page’s exact settings, 4,500 words went into grids and 2,236 of them ran backwards, upwards or up and back along a diagonal: a shade under half. The same count on the middle setting is zero out of 3,900.
Eight of the twenty-five counties end in -shire
Cheshire, Wiltshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, Shropshire, Hampshire and Berkshire. Fifteen names go onto each board, so several of the eight are always in play: over three hundred boards the average was 4.85 of them, the leanest board carried two and the fullest carried all eight. The finished grid therefore holds the same five-letter tail in several places at once, and that tail is the easiest thing on the board to see.
It is worth hunting deliberately. Once you have S-H-I-R-E in a straight run, the rest of the name lies on the far side of the S, running back the way you read the tail. On a backwards placement you meet the ending before the beginning, which is the reverse of the order the eye expects and most of the reason this board feels slower than its size suggests.
Every letter in the grid comes from a word hidden in it
The letters filling the gaps are not drawn from the alphabet. They are drawn from the letters of the fifteen counties actually on that board, in the proportions those names use them, which is why a grid of place names reads like place names instead of like static. Across three hundred boards and 67,500 cells there was not a single letter that did not occur in one of that board’s own hidden words. J, Q and Z never appear at all.
That hands you an opening. V occurs in exactly one name on the list and X in two, so a V or an X on the board is a short list rather than a guess. It is not a giveaway either, because the filler copies its letters off the hidden words: a rare letter tells you which county is somewhere on the board, not that this particular cell belongs to it.
Fifteen of twenty-five, and a different fifteen next time
Ten names sit out every board, and which ten is drawn again on every load, so a second go is a different puzzle rather than the same one shifted about. If a fifteen-wide board at full difficulty is more than you wanted, the thirteen-wide grid runs at the middle setting and the winter grid at the easy one.