JetPunk Word Search Puzzle Statistics - Updated to August 2022!

It's been over a month since the last blog was published, and before you know it, JetPunk's daily word search is already six months old! In this blog, I will share with you the latest word and letter stats for the puzzles in JetPunk's newest minigame, Daily Word Search, updated to August 14, 2022.

I just want to give you a caveat before we start. As Thursdays' theme has changed from History Thursday to Picture Thursday, I will not be including the two Picture Thursdays so far (Aug 4 and Aug 11) in some parts of this blog. Those parts will be marked with an asterisk (*) next to their headings.

Also, starting next month I'll be presenting separate stats for History Thursday and Picture Thursday (not this month since so far there have been only two Picture Thursdays).

1. Overview

✓ From March 1 (#29) to August 14 (#195), there were 3,030 total words in all grids. The number of words in the average grid still stands at 18.1.

✓ The largest puzzles so far were puzzles #41 (Sun, Mar 13), #120 (Tue, May 31), #132 (Sun, Jun 12), #176 (Tue, Jul 26), and #195 (Sun, Aug 14), all with 30 words. Meanwhile, puzzle #89 (Sat, Apr 30) managed to remain as the smallest word search puzzle, with just 10 words.

✓ Overall (excluding Picture Thursdays), Sundays' puzzles had the most words (22 in average grid), whereas Mondays' puzzles had the fewest words (13.3 in average grid).

✓ For Saturdays (since April 9), India appears to be Stewart's favorite country, holding on to the top spot with 9 appearances! Meanwhile, Italy and Oman each appeared 8 times; Iran, Laos, Mali and Sudan each appeared 6 times; Chad, Chile, Ghana and Peru each appeared 5 times.

2. Puzzle Size Distribution

The following is the distribution of puzzle sizes as of August 14:

*3. Average Words per Grid by Weekday

The following table summarizes the average number of words per grid for each weekday, as well as how they compare with last month:

*4. Measures of Spread

Now let's take a look at the variance (a measure of how spread out the data are) of the number of words in each weekday's puzzles, as well as how they compare with last month:

As you can see, Tuesdays' and Fridays' puzzles are now the most unpredictable ones in terms of the number of words in the grids, whereas Mondays' puzzles remain the most consistent.

0. Caveats

Before we dive into the stats for the letters, let me point out a few things:

- These data are for letters in the words, not the grids.

- Only words from April 9 onwards are included since that's when I started collecting data.

- For Sundays, the actual words are used instead of the clues.

1. Overview

✓ From April 9 (#68) to August 14 (#195), there were 2,314 total words in all puzzles (excluding the numbers in puzzle #81) made up of 14,277 individual letters. The average word length now stands at approximately 6.17 letters (slightly increased compared to last month), and there are now about 112.4 letters per puzzle (also slightly increased from last month).

✓ Overall (excluding Picture Thursdays), Tuesdays' puzzles had the most letters in them (137 in average puzzle). Mondays' puzzles, as always, had the fewest letters in them (72 in average puzzle).

✓ The puzzle with the most letters was puzzle #195 (Sun, Aug 14) with an astonishing 249 letters! Meanwhile, puzzle #189 (Mon, Aug 8) is now the smallest puzzle in terms of the number of letters, with just 52 (again, that's excluding puzzle #81, which was all numbers).

✓ The letters A and E have managed to dominate the word searches for a fourth month. Since April 9, they have appeared 1,776 and 1,452 times respectively. Just these two letters alone have accounted for nearly a quarter (or 22.6%, to be precise) of all letters in the puzzles' words!

✓ In addition to A and E, the letters I, N and R have also topped 1,000 occurrences!

*2. Average Letters per Puzzle by Weekday

The following table summarizes the average number of letters per puzzle for each weekday, as well as how they compare with last month:

3. Table of Letter Occurrences and Percentages

The following is a detailed table summarizing the number of occurrences of each letter, how they changed from last month, as well as the percentage that each letter accounts for:

With the introduction of Picture Thursday, things are getting a bit more complicated. Having said that, I will still be making these statistics blogs in the future, and to be honest, I'm really excited to see how Picture Thursday will turn out! Thanks for reading!