What you are actually searching
A word can start at any square and run in any of eight directions: four along the rows and columns, four diagonally. On the harder setting some of them are written backwards, which is really just the other four of those eight.
The useful consequence: do not search the grid, search for a letter. One specific letter is a target your eye can find without reading anything.
Hunt the first letter, then look eight ways
Take one word from the list. Look only for its first letter, ignoring everything else on the grid. Your eye is very good at picking a single character out of noise, and much worse at reading lines of nonsense.
Every S in the grid
Only one had a U after it
The second letter does nearly all the filtering. Each candidate takes about a second to reject, and you only continue reading in a direction that has already matched twice.
Choose the right word to look for next
The list is not meant to be worked through top to bottom. Some words are far easier to find than others, and every word you find removes letters from the grid and shrinks the search for the rest.
- Longest first. A nine-letter word barely fits on the grid, so it has very few possible positions. It is also the most conspicuous once you are near it.
- Then the rare letters. A word starting with J, Q, X, Z or K is almost free — there may only be two of that letter anywhere in the grid. Scan for the rare letter even if it is in the middle of the word.
- Double letters are a gift. LL, SS, EE and OO are easy to spot as a pair, and they pin both the position and the direction at once.
- Leave the short common words until last. Four-letter words made of common letters have the most false starts, and by then the grid is much emptier.
Themes help too. Once you have found two words from a theme you often know roughly where the rest were packed in, because words are placed to overlap and interlock.
Sweep the grid, do not wander it
The single biggest time sink is re-reading the same region without noticing. It happens because the eye drifts back to the middle of the grid, and to wherever the last word was found.
Two fixes, both slightly mechanical and both effective:
- Sweep in fixed lines. Read the grid left to right, one row at a time, all the way to the bottom, hunting for your target letter. Then stop. If it is not there, it is not there.
- Do the diagonals separately. Diagonal words are the ones people miss, because horizontal and vertical reading is a habit. When a word will not appear, tilt your head and sweep the diagonals deliberately — that is where it usually is.
Edges and corners deserve a specific pass. Long words are often pushed to the border because that is where they fit, and the corners are the part of the grid the eye visits least.
When words run backwards
Turning on backwards words does not double the work, though it feels as if it should. The first-letter method already looks in all eight directions from each starting square, so the only real change is that the letter you hunt for could be either end of the word.
The practical adjustment: hunt for whichever end of the word has the rarer letter. For a word ending in X or Z, search for that instead of the first letter. You are looking for the word in a direction, not from a beginning.
It also helps to read the list aloud backwards once for the awkward entries. Seeing NOGARD written out makes it far easier to notice on the grid than trying to spot DRAGON reversed in the moment.
Time yourself once, then again
Do one grid however you normally would, then do another using longest-first and single-letter sweeps. The difference is usually larger than people expect.