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
Letter frequency word variants when counting, such as "abstracts", "abstracted" and "abstracting" and not just the root word of "abstract". This system results in letters like "s" appearing much more frequently, such as when counting letters from lists of the most used English words on the Internet. A final variant is to count letters based on their frequency of use in actual texts, resulting in certain letter combinations like "th" becoming more common due to the frequent use of common words like "the". Absolute usage frequency measures like this are used when creating keyboard layouts or letter frequencies in old fashioned printing