Give your word power a run for its money

People who like words are always looking for a new game to stretch their skills a bit. Find A Word is a very simple little program, but it is useful, well-designed and will definitely provide some gentle entertainment and brain training word fans out there.

The Find A Word interface is clear and well laid-out. Start Game will give you a new set of 8 letters. Your challenge is to make as many words as you can from the selection, adding them to the box below and pressing Enter to see if you are right. All 80,000-plus words contained in Find A Word are available to view and modify, meaning you can delete any words you don’t like, add ones you do or change the spelling from American to other types of English. There’s actually nothing to stop you adding words in other languages too.

You can also modify the way Find A Word is played, changing the number of seconds you have in a turn and swapping turns when you want a new selection of letters before the time is up. You could also use this feature to turn Find A Word into a two-player game. The program keeps record of your score as you go along, and also keeps track of you all-time highs. Find A Word contains a small but useful help file, and also a link to a website that will show you all the possible words that you could have made from your letters.

Find A Word is by no means a slick program, but will provide a few hours’ brain-training nonetheless.