Word search puzzles have, like crosswords and arrowords, been very popular in the United Kingdom, and - also in common with these latter puzzles - have had complete magazines devoted to them. Word searches are commonly found in daily newspapers and puzzle books. Some teachers use them as educational tools for children, the benefit being that young minds can learn new words and their spellings by intensively searching for them, letter by letter, in the puzzle. A common strategy for finding all the words is to go through the puzzle left to right (or vice versa) and look for the first letter
Word square place names). However, 11-squares are possible if words from a number of languages are allowed ("Word Ways", August 2004 and May 2005). It is possible to estimate the degree of difficulty of constructing word squares. 5-squares can be constructed with as little as a 250-word vocabulary. Roughly, for each step upwards, one needs four times the number of words. For a 9-square, one needs over 60,000 9-letter words, which is practically all of those in single very large dictionaries. For large squares, the vocabulary prevents selecting more "desirable" words (i.e. words that are unhyphenated, in common use, without contrived inflections,