JetPunk Word Search 2022/23: Year in Review - Puzzle Stats

It's been a year since the most-taken minigame on JetPunk, the Daily Word Search, was born. However, because it was getting difficult for Stewart to keep on creating puzzles daily, the minigame has now ended. I must say, this minigame completely changed the way I used JetPunk, made me more active on the site, and undoubtedly increased JetPunk's popularity. RIP Word Search, you will be missed.

Alright, I guess that's enough sad news. In Stewart's blog, he already presented some amazing stats for this minigame. However, the main focus of his stats was on the minigame's traffic and users, with little data for the puzzles themselves. That's why I am here to present more puzzle stats I have collected and compiled myself! But before we start, I just want to give you some caveats and define some of the terms used in this blog.

- I started collecting data for the letters and Saturday countries on April 9, 2022, so the data are incomplete.

- The data for the words start from March 1, 2022, as Tuesday's and Thursday's themes changed just before that, and I missed three puzzles in February.

- As Thursday's theme changed again in August, I have included separate data for History Thursday and Picture Thursday.

- The main section of this blog, comprising parts 1 and 2, only includes stats for the "normal" grids up to puzzle #360 (Thu, Jan 26). The stats for the "mega" grids can be found in the dedicated "Mega Grid Stats" section at the end.

✓ A "week" is defined as a period of seven days, running from a Tuesday to the following Monday.

- For convenience, weeks are numbered in this blog, with week 1 running from February 1 to February 7, 2022.

✓ A "word" is defined as an individual answer in a grid.

- This means that even if an answer contains two or more words by convention (e.g. "United States"), it is still counted as one word.

✓ A "letter" is defined as any uppercase or lowercase letter in the English alphabet.

- Letters with diacritics are also included, but will have their diacritics stripped. For example, "São Tomé" becomes "Sao Tome".

- Digits (which are only found in puzzles #81, #100 and #356) are not counted as letters, nor are any hyphens, apostrophes or symbols (found in a handful of puzzles).

Now that we've gone over the caveats and definitions, let's dive in!

✓ From March 1 (#29) to January 26 (#360), there were 6,165 total words in all grids, giving an average of 18.57 words per grid. This number has risen significantly since I published the very first stats blog, when it was 17.9.

✓ Week 44 (Nov 29 - Dec 5) contained the most words, with 159. The week immediately following it (week 45, Dec 6 - 12) had 153 words - the second highest overall, only six words below week 44. On the other end of the spectrum, week 30 (Aug 23 - 29) contained the fewest words, with just 108.

✓ The largest puzzles were #302 (Tue, Nov 29) and #321 (Sun, Dec 18), both of which contain 32 words. Meanwhile, puzzle #89 (Sat, Apr 30) was the smallest word search puzzle, with just 10 words.

✓ Overall, Sundays' puzzles had the most words (21.4 in average grid), whereas Mondays' puzzles had the fewest words (14.3 in average grid).

✓ For Saturdays (since April 9), Iran was the country with the most appearances, with 19. Meanwhile, Oman appeared 17 times; Iraq appeared 15 times; Italy, Laos and Mali each appeared 13 times.

The following table summarizes the total and average number of words in each week of the minigame's existence, starting from week 5 (Mar 1 - 7):

From March 1 to January 26, we had:

✓ 32 "mini" puzzles (≤12 words);

✓ 103 "small" puzzles (13~16 words);

✓ 88 "medium" puzzles (17~20 words);

✓ 77 "large" puzzles (21~25 words); and

✓ 32 "extra large" puzzles (≥26 words).

Below is a more detailed distribution of puzzle sizes (H = History Thursday, P = Picture Thursday):

The following table summarizes the average number of words per grid for each weekday:

The following table summarizes the variance (a measure of dispersion) of the word counts for each weekday:

Below are some interesting data and facts about the countries that appeared in Saturday grids (since April 9, 2022):

✓ The frequencies of countries seem to be unrelated to their areas or population numbers:

- China, the world's most populous country (for now), only appeared four times;

- Russia, the world's largest country, only appeared six times.

✓ Shorter countries tended to appear more often. No countries with 10 or more appearances are more than five letters long; nine of those 17 countries (52.9%) are four letters long.

✓ Excluding puzzle #110, countries' frequencies and the lengths of their names are negatively correlated: the Pearson correlation coefficient between frequency and length is -0.631; the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient is -0.646.

Below is a list of all countries with at least 10 appearances:

✓ From April 9 (#68) to January 26 (#360), there were 5,448 total words in all puzzles (excluding the numbers in puzzle #81) made up of 33,303 individual letters, averaging approximately 6.11 letters per word and about 114.1 letters per puzzle.

✓ The puzzle with the longest words was #325 (Thu, Dec 22), with an average of 9.57 letters per word. Meanwhile, puzzle #205 (Wed, Aug 24) had the shortest words (again excluding puzzle #81), averaging just 4.19 letters per word.

✓ Week 28 (Aug 9 - 15) contained the most letters, with 976; week 30 (Aug 23 - 29) contained the fewest letters, with just 618.

✓ Overall, Tuesdays' puzzles had the most letters in them (129.5 in average puzzle); Mondays' puzzles contained the fewest letters (78.5 in average puzzle).

✓ The puzzle with the most letters was #195 (Sun, Aug 14) with 249 letters. On the other end of the spectrum, puzzle #189 (Mon, Aug 8) was the smallest puzzle in terms of the number of letters, with just 52 (again, that's excluding puzzle #81, which was all numbers).

✓ 40.3% of all letters were vowels (A, E, I, O, U).

✓ The word search puzzles were dominated by A and E: they appeared 4,073 and 3,398 times respectively, and just these two letters alone accounted for nearly a quarter (or 22.4%, to be precise) of all letters in the puzzles' words!

✓ 13 of the 26 letters, or one-half of the alphabet, managed to surpass 1,000 occurrences. They are, in alphabetical order: A, C, D, E, I, L, M, N, O, R, S, T, U. Among the other letters, H occurred 940 times (the highest in the sub-1,000 club), just 60 short of 1,000.

The top 10 puzzles with the longest and shortest words are listed below:

The following table summarizes the distribution of word lengths. Interestingly enough, no words contained fewer than four letters.

The following table summarizes the total and average number of letters in each week of the minigame's existence, starting from week 11 (Apr 12 - 18):

* This week contained a number grid (#81 on Friday 22nd), so the total was divided by 6 instead of 7

The following table summarizes the average number of letters per puzzle for each weekday:

The following table summarizes the number of occurrences of each letter, as well as the percentage that each letter accounted for:

Below are some stats and facts about the words that appeared in Mega grids:

✓ There were 306 total words in all five Mega grids, giving an average of 61.2 words per grid. This average is approximately 3.30 times that of the "normal" grids.

✓ The Mega grid with the most words was Mega #2 (Countries), with 90. Meanwhile, Mega #5 (U.S. States) contained the fewest words, with just 50 (as expected).

The following table lists the number of words in each of the five Mega grids, in order of most to fewest:

Below are some stats and facts about the letters that appeared in Mega word searches:

✓ The 306 words in all five Mega puzzles were made up of 2,044 individual letters, averaging approximately 6.68 letters per word (1.09 times normal puzzles) and 408.8 letters per puzzle (3.58 times normal puzzles).

✓ The Mega puzzle with the longest words was Mega #5 (U.S. States), averaging 8.24 letters per word. Meanwhile, Mega #1 (Animals) had the shortest words, with an average of 5.35 letters per word.

✓ The Mega puzzle with the most letters was Mega #2 (Countries), with 591. Meanwhile, Mega #1 (Animals) contained the fewest letters, with just 273.

✓ No words contained fewer than four letters, just like in "normal" puzzles. However, the longest word was "Central African Republic" in Mega #2 (Countries) with 22 letters!

✓ In the Mega puzzles, 41.3% of all letters were vowels (A, E, I, O, U). This is one percentage point higher than "normal" puzzles.

✓ The letter A dominated the mega puzzles: 14.33% of all letters were A's, which means an A occurred every seven letters or so! The second most frequent letter, E, only represented 8.56% of all letters, almost six percentage points below A!

The following table lists the average word length of each of the five Mega puzzles, in order of longest to shortest:

The following table lists the number of letters in each of the five Mega puzzles, in order of most to fewest:

The following table summarizes the distribution of word lengths in the Mega puzzles:

And the following table summarizes the number of occurrences of each letter in the Mega puzzles, as well as the percentage that each letter accounted for:

So that wraps up all the stats. Like I said at the start, when this minigame existed, it completely altered the way I used JetPunk. It became part of my daily routine. It managed to keep me on the site by introducing something different every single day. And most importantly, I enjoyed collecting data for the word search puzzles and sharing those data with everyone in the form of blogs! Rest in peace Word Search, you will be remembered forever.