Word Hunt Solver
Enter the 16 letters from your board, then press Solve. Click any word to trace its path across the grid.
Found Words
Fill in the grid and press Solve.
What this solver does
Type in the 16 letters from your Word Hunt board, press Solve, and every word the board contains comes back sorted longest first. Click one and its path is drawn across the grid, tile by tile, in the order you would swipe it.
The path is the part worth paying attention to. Word Hunt gives you 80 seconds, which is not enough time to read a list, so the value is in learning to see the shapes: which tile the long words keep starting from, where the vowels sit, which corner is a dead end.
Why the board is always 4×4
Word Hunt is played on a single 16 tile board, so that is the only size here. Each of the four interior tiles touches all eight of its neighbours, the eight edge tiles touch five, and the four corners touch three, which works out to an average of 5.3 ways to continue a word from any given tile.
Sixteen tiles with diagonals allowed is enough to hold several hundred words, and the theoretical longest is the full 16 letters, since no tile may be used twice in one word. In practice the useful ceiling is around eight or nine.
How it finds the words
The solver runs a depth first search from every tile, stepping to any neighbour it has not already used and checking at each step whether the letters so far spell a word.
Searched naively that explodes, so each partial path is also tested against the set of valid prefixes. The moment the letters cannot begin any word in the dictionary, the whole branch is dropped unexplored. A path starting ZX dies after two tiles instead of being chased across the board, which is what makes a full solve feel instant.
Which dictionary it uses
Words are checked against CSW2019 (Collins Scrabble Words 2019), which holds about 279,000 words. It is the most permissive of the major English word lists, so it accepts a great deal that a North American list such as NWL rejects, including two letter words like CH, EE, and ZO.
That generosity is the point. A solver is most useful when it shows you everything the board can make, and you can always ignore a word you do not trust. Word Hunt uses its own internal dictionary that is not published, so no list will match it exactly; Collins is the closest widely available approximation, and it errs toward showing you more rather than less.
The minimum length here is three letters, which matches Word Hunt itself. Scores shown beside each word are standard Scrabble tile values, included as a rough measure of how valuable a word is, and they are not Word Hunt's own scoring.
How Word Hunt scores
Word Hunt pays by length, and steeply. Three and four letter words are worth very little, while every letter past five adds considerably more than the last, so a single long word can outweigh a dozen short ones. The practical consequence is that hunting for length beats hunting for volume.
That is the opposite of how most people play at first. Sweeping up every three letter word feels productive and uses most of the 80 seconds for very few points. Finding two eight letter words in the same time is usually the better game.
Tips and strategy
- 1.Start from the four middle tiles. They have eight neighbours each against three for a corner, so the longest words almost always run through the centre of the board.
- 2.Look for suffixes that are already adjacent. An ING, ED, ER, or EST sitting together turns a five letter word into an eight letter one, which is where the points are.
- 3.Check plurals last, but do check them. Adding an S to a word you have already swiped is nearly free, and on a board with an S in a reachable spot it can double your word count.
- 4.Swipe the long words first. The clock is the real constraint, and a long word found with ten seconds left is worth more than the twenty short ones you could have taken instead.
- 5.Watch the paths the solver draws on the words you missed. The recurring shapes are what transfer to the next board; the word list itself does not.
Frequently asked questions
Which dictionary are the results checked against?+
CSW2019, the Collins Scrabble Words list, which contains roughly 279,000 words. It is deliberately the permissive choice so the solver shows you everything the board can make.
Why do some words not work in the game?+
Word Hunt uses its own dictionary, which is not published, so no external list matches it exactly. Collins is broader than most, which means you will occasionally see a word the game rejects. Treat the results as a guide to the board rather than a guarantee.
Can I solve a different board size?+
Not here, because Word Hunt only has the one. If you want a 3×3 or 5×5 board, the Boggle solver on this site handles all three sizes.
Do diagonal moves count?+
Yes. Any of the eight surrounding tiles is a legal next step, exactly as in the game. Allowing diagonals is why a 4×4 board holds far more words than people expect.
Can a tile be used twice in one word?+
No. A word has to trace a path that never revisits a tile, which caps the longest possible word on the board at 16 letters. If the same letter appears on two separate tiles, both are available, so a word like LEVEL works when there are two Ls and two Es.
Is this the same as the Boggle solver?+
The search is the same and so is the path drawing. The differences are the board size, pinned to 4×4 here, and the dictionary: this page uses Collins while the Boggle solver uses the site's general word index.
Does using a solver count as cheating?+
In a live game against someone, plainly yes. Where it genuinely helps is afterwards: solving a board you have just played shows you what you missed and why, which is how people actually get faster at finding long words under the clock.