Fancy stretching your brain box this fine Saturday, June 2? Well, why not try your hand at one of the hardest word search puzzles ever designed?
For those of you who’ve never done a word search the goal is simple, like the name implies, all you have to do is find the word hidden in the jumble of letters.
That should be easy enough, right?
To make things even easier, in this case, there’s only one word and it’s just three letters long, D-O-G, dog.
The word’s hidden in a hodgepodge of Ds, Os, and Gs, just 14 characters across and 14 characters down.
Sounds easy right? Well take a look at this and let us know how easy you think it’s going to be, because trust me when I say, this puzzle isn’t man’s best friend:
Hard right? It certainly had a few people at UNILAD Towers scratching their heads.
Don’t go thinking this is a puzzle with an out of the box answer either. The word dog is hidden in the word search – not in the title or underneath the word search.
Seen it yet?
No, well, we’re going to let you in on a secret that’ll help you solve any word search in mere minutes and make you the envy of enigmatologist’s (People who do puzzles) across the world:
Start by going through the puzzle left to right while looking for the first letter of the word.
When you find it, scour the surrounding eight characters around it to see if the next letter in the word is there and so on, eventually you should have gone through the whole puzzle and found the word.
So in the case of this word search start by hunting down the D and then look for an O, if you find the O the G shouldn’t be too far behind.
Another strategy commonly used is hunting the ‘remarkable letters’ within the word that aren’t so common in English, your Q, J, X, and Zs, once you find one of these rarer letters you should be able to solve the puzzle easily.
Another top tip for solving a particularly twisted word search is to hunt down the double letters in a word, as they tend to be rarer as well.
Of course, there are no remarkable letters within the word dog nor are there any double letters so these tips a lot less helpful in this particular puzzle.
Who knows maybe it’ll serve you in future if, after you solve this puzzle, you become hooked on solving them like some low-rent Sherlock Holmes.
So have you found the word dog yet using our tips?
Well if the ‘dog’ has evaded you thus far, here’s the answer:
If you managed to find the word dog on your own, well done.
Why not give yourself a pat on the back or a delicious treat because you’re a very good boy for sniffing out the answer.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via stories@unilad.co.uk.
More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.
Since then his rise has been described by himself as ‘meteoric’ rising to the esteemed rank of Social Editor at UNILAD as well as working at the BBC, Manchester Evening News, and ITV.
He credits his success to three core techniques, name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake.