Word Lists for Word Searches.

This post follows on from the first post on word searches and the post on the use of a spreadsheet for collecting word search lists.

It’s now time to look for lots and lots of words. These are what I have so far, using the techniques mentioned in the last post. I am now going to go for quantity and not worry about duplicates or word lengths because the spreadsheet can find duplicates and seek out words of a specific length for me AFTER I get the words. For a large word search book I will need at least 2000 words.

Search Engines and AI Tools

First, I will use search engines like Google, Bing and others to get lists. Then I will use AI Tools like ChatGPT and Claude to get more. With the search engines I will probably use the search term “word list for hiking terrains” or similar depending on my sub-themes and with ChatGPT and Claude I will probably use the prompt, “Could you provide a list of words for the sub-theme hiking terrains in a single column please, with words one under the other? I will be using the same chat in which I previously asked for sub themes and it will recognise this and continue the chat.

RESULTS

It took me 53 minutes to get 565 words in my spreadsheet using Google and Bing and then finally ChatGPT. I have to say that ChatGPT is far better for this than the search engines. I found some useful words on the search engines but some I had to type in manually and finding them was a hassle. I went down a few Google and Bing Tunnels!  ChatGPT found me a whole load of words quickly and presented them in a single list I was just able to copy and paste. I used a formula to count the words and will use more formulae later on to sort them because I know there will be duplicates for a start. But I will make a video on this later and show you how to do this.

I then asked Claude for words. I went and used Claude and used up all my free time available on the tool. This took me up to 1133 words on the spreadsheet. words on the spreadsheet. Definitely ChatGPT and Claude are beating the search engines hands down in terms of finding words for a word search. About 20 minutes using Claude and that nearly doubled the number of words in a very short time. That includes copy and paste the lists and writing the prompts. You can see that the spreadsheet is now much more filled in than the top picture. There are also words outside of the picture, both below and to the right.

UPDATE

I decided to go for numbers of words today. I have used both ChatGPT and Claude until I got a message saying my free use was up for today. It took me 36 minutes (in total), I used a timer to check how long I was using them. I had 1133 words at the end of yesterday (and therefore when I started today) and I now have 1732 words, so about 600 words with about 36 minutes of work. I asked Claude for words for camping, rather than hiking. The screenshot shows how much more word heavy the spreadsheet is today, compared with yesterday. If you click on the picture, you should be able to see it much bigger.
I know that there are repeats in there and some words will be too long, so I will continue to add words once I get back my usage of ChatGPT and Claude. I will need at least 2000 words available for a full size adult word search book, though I would be able to use fewer for a large print book and I would only need 300 for a coloring word search book. All 3 types of book could be created from one list. I am comparing how long it took me to create a list for my first word search book. It had 75 pages, each with 20 words, so I got 1500 words and it took me several days to collect enough. I didn’t use the AI tools for that (didn’t know you could) and it was hard going. This is a lot easier.

ANOTHER UPDATE

I decided to get as many words as possible done in 15 minutes. I set my timer to 15 minutes, looked at the sub themes with the least numbers of words and just blasted ChatGPT for 10 minutes, til it told me my free time was up, (about 10 minutes), then Claude until the timer went off. At the end of the time I had a total of 2291 words on the spreadsheet. So that was 15 minutes to go from 1732 words to 2291 words. I now  need to go through the words, remove duplicates, check word lengths, etc., and will use the spreadsheet tools to do that. I will make some more videos to show how this is done.