How many words can you find in this letter scramble I made? 5? 10? 20?

Challenge yourself and your friends and try to find every word hidden in the grid! Make sure to look sideways, up and down, and diagonally! It’s a tricky one.

And if you find any let me know. Maybe write down anything you do find and make a note of where it was. Try to be thorough though—maybe start in one corner, check all the possibilities, and then move on to the next letter. I want you to get every last word hidden in this word puzzle!

I know it’s a bit of a slog but this is the not-so-glamorous part of making the word searches that you and so many others have so much fun scribbling all over. Randomly placing all the letters is the easy part, testing to see if there are any words in there is the real time suck. I’ve already made ten of these today and I’ve been pouring over them for hours—nothing. I mean usually you get a “TOO” or a “FEE” or something, but finding a word that’s four or five letters long is super rare, not to mention a list of polysyllabic terms that all fit a certain theme like Easter or Dinner.

So I really hate to do this, but would you mind just looking over this one so I can get a quick break and maybe grab a coffee? Don’t sweat it if you don’t find anything, I don’t have high hopes. I took a cursory glance at it and saw tons of Xs, Ys and Zs, which is never a good sign. I should really stop adding so many when I’m randomly placing letters in there, I just get really excited at the prospect that we’ll accidentally get “xylophone” or “zoology” or something one of these days.

Thanks for being such a good sport about this, I’m just up to my neck in word search commissions and running on fumes. I’ll grab you something at Starbucks if you want? On me. And that Starbucks on the corner is always mobbed this time of day, so if I’m not back for a while and this grid doesn’t seem like a winner, feel free to make another and start from the top. It’s pretty straightforward, you’ll pick it up quickly. Just think of a random letter, write it down, and then repeat that 368 times. I usually do a 23 x 16 grid but if you want to make it bigger, go for it.

Seriously, just do whatever works best for you and take your time with it—as long as we have 20 of these by tomorrow morning we’ll be able to keep the Red Lobster placemat account.

What do you mean?

How could they go bankrupt? The seafood fettuccine was $26.

That can’t be. That's impossi–

If what you’re telling me is true I’m going to have to make some calls. The Red Lobster account was our sure thing, our steady gal. If that’s gone, what the hell is left? TGI Fridays? Big Boy?

I’m going to go grab that coffee but instead of working on the puzzle you’d be doing me a huge favor by just calling my wife and telling her to empty the lockbox at the bank. She knows the code, it’s my birthday. Once you’ve done that, if I’m still stuck in that Starbucks line, maybe just head down to that new Montessori school we just enrolled the twins in. Tell them we’re no longer interested and we need the deposit back. I guess they’re going back to public school.

Do you realize how few educational word searches they use in public school? They’re going to be crushed. Once you have the kids with you they can help you move all of our stuff out of the house and take it to my mother’s. We just moved into the place so the for sale sign is in the garage. Just plant it in the front lawn and if you get any calls, don’t even entertain anything under asking price.

And listen, once you’ve sorted all that out I’ll probably be back, but if not, feel free to get back on word searching. I don’t want to stress you out because this really should be a fun thing, but we’re probably going to need to double or triple our output here to keep our head above water so don’t be too picky. Now that the Red Lobster account is kaput we’d be lucky to find an “AS”, “AT” or “TO.”

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