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
Longest word in English Sylvia Plath made mention of it in her semi-autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar", when the protagonist was reading "Finnegans Wake". "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", the 34-letter title of a song from the movie "Mary Poppins", does appear in several dictionaries, but only as a proper noun defined in reference to the song title. The attributed meaning is "a word that you say when you don't know what to say." The idea and invention of the word is credited to songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman. The English language permits the legitimate extension of existing words to serve new purposes by the addition of prefixes