Play around with words

My topic was ‘Ballroom Dances’ and it’s embarrassing that the ridiculously long ‘Viennese Waltz’ proved to be so elusive on the modest sized 12x14 letter grid. Wordsearch on www.eastoftheweb.com [1] is elegantly black, white and grey. It would have been so easy to go for colour, clever graphics, and eye popping hot spots. Instead, the designers opted for understated elegance, and incredibly sophisticated click-and-drag handling and selected word highlights.

An agonising six minutes and 58 seconds later, I was still seven dances short of closure. Wordsearch allows you to choose from daily puzzles, or from a generous list of topics. Your selection reveals a topic-based set of words, that are hidden in full view, in a letter grid. Click and drag the letters to form a rectangular box around the word you search out!
The daily grid solution is revealed the day after. My year or so of dance classes saw me through a couple of Salsa term exams. Clearly I had two left feet, and was reluctantly asked to dance by partners, and only when they had to choose between no one to dance with at all, or make do with me! I fared better at Ballroom Dances at Wordsearch, but barely so!
Fascinated with the game, and appalled at how poorly I was doing, I decided to try another grid. This time my topic was ‘Oceans and Seas’. Fifteen of them to identify. And I hadn’t even heard of eight on the list! Wordsearch is more than finding words under time pressure. It’s an educational tour de force. Some three minutes later I hadn’t located a single ocean or sea, and was still happily engrossed trying to place ‘Sargasso’! Hadn’t I heard the name in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films?
If you’re a glutton for punishment play the topics. This section allows you to select degree of difficulty. Choose ‘very large’ sized grids, with ‘very many’ words and the higher level of proficiency. Wordsearch is addictive, educative, and marvelously good fun.
— The author may be contacted at arup_kavan@yahoo.com [2]