LinkedIn Wend: hidden words traced through a letter grid, every letter used once — how to play and today's answer

The rules, and the arithmetic behind them

LinkedIn's rules are three lines: connect adjacent letters, horizontally or vertically, to form words; every letter must be used exactly once; words cannot overlap. The arithmetic follows from them: the answer rows under the grid add up to the number of letters on the board. On 21 September 2026 (#105) the rows were 3, 4, 5 and 6 letters — 18 letters on a 5×5 grid with 7 empty cells. On 6 September (#90) they were five words of nine letters each, 45 letters on a 7×7 grid. Every word you commit removes its letters from play, and what is left must still split into the remaining rows.

You play by dragging from one letter to adjacent letters and releasing to submit. Per LinkedIn's Help page, a correct word fills one of the matching rows and stays highlighted; an incorrect word stays highlighted in the grid but fills no row. Hint erases mistakes or reveals the next correct letter in the sequence, Undo reverts your last move, and Reset clears the grid.

Where to start: the dead ends

Look for a letter that touches only one other letter — a corner, or a cell boxed in by empty cells and the edge. A word can't pass *through* that letter, because it would need two neighbours, so it must be the first or last letter of its word, and the word must continue into its single neighbour. In our archive there were 49 such one-neighbour letters, and all 49 were a word's first or last letter. Find them before you look for words at all.

Next, read the answer rows. The longest row is the hardest word to hide and the easiest to recognise once you have its first three letters; the shortest is easy to find and easy to find wrongly, because three-letter words turn up all over a grid. Start from the dead ends, then the longest row, and leave the short words for last, when the leftover letters choose them for you.

A worked board: Wend #105, 21 September 2026

The grid, row by row, with · for an empty cell: T C B O J / J E P M · / E D A U · / U J · J · / S T · · ·. Eighteen letters, and the rows under the grid ask for words of 3, 4, 5 and 6 letters. Four Js on one board is the first thing to notice.

Dead end one. The J in the top-right corner touches only the O beside it (the cell below is empty), so a word starts or ends J-O. The O touches B: JOB, three letters, row one filled.

Dead end two. The J at row 4, column 4 has empty cells to its left, right and below; its only neighbour is the U above it. J-U, then M, then P: JUMP, four letters.

Dead end three. With those placed, the A at row 3, column 3 has lost its neighbours above (P) and to the right (U), and the cell below is empty — its only way out is the D to its left. A-D-J-U-S-T runs left, down, left, down and right: ADJUST, six letters. The five letters left — E, J, E, C, T — run up the left side and into the top-left corner: EJECT. Board clear: JOB, JUMP, EJECT, ADJUST.

Nothing on this board needed a guess. Three of the four words were forced by letters with a single neighbour, and the last was simply what remained.

Reading the tiles

Count the letters and compare with the rows. In our archive (37 boards, #87 on 3 September to #124 on 10 October 2026) grids ran from 5×5 to 8×8, with between 2 and 24 empty cells, and the letters always matched the row total exactly. Empty cells are not decoration: a path cannot cross one, so they carve the grid into corridors, and a corridor one cell wide forces the word through it in one direction.

Look for letters that only combine one way. A Q needs a U next to it (SQUAT, TECHNIQUE, SEQUENCE and BOUQUET all appear in our archive); a J or an X with only one or two neighbours narrows the candidate words to a handful. Then look for shared material: on several boards the words share a letter or a chunk — every word on 21 September contained J, every word on 6 October contained EX.

Letter patterns that pay

Habits that pay on Wend boards, each with examples from our archive.

• -ING, -ED, -ER, -LY, -ION — endings mark the far end of a long word; trace backwards from them. FENCING, TAXIING, ATTEMPTED, DOWNLOADED and OBJECTION all ended this way.
• Consonant clusters — ST, TR, CH, SH, BR: two consonants that sit together in English and side by side on the grid cut the search fast.
• Q needs U; Y is a vowel in disguise — treat Y as a vowel when you count what's left.
• Doubled letters — two of the same letter side by side may sit inside one word (CINNAMON, BALLERINA, BOOMERANG) or be split between two; check both readings.
• Leftover checks — before committing a word, glance at what remains and ask whether it still splits into the remaining row lengths.

When a valid word doesn't fill a row

LinkedIn's Help page describes what happens: a correct word fills a matching row; an incorrect word stays highlighted in the grid but fills nothing. So if you trace a real English word and no row fills, the word is real but not one of the puzzle's — the letters you used belong to other words. Undo it, or use Hint, which erases mistakes, and try reading the same cells in a different direction.

The dictionary question

LinkedIn doesn't publish Wend's word list. What our archive shows is the answers themselves: 164 words across 37 boards, from 3 to 10 letters long — six-letter and seven-letter words were the most common (27 and 28) and ten-letter words the rarest (8). All of them are ordinary English words; none is a proper noun, and inflected forms do appear (SHADOWS, ACCIDENTS, ATTEMPTED, BARGAINED, TEXTURED). Because a word that isn't an answer simply fails to fill a row, you can't tell from the board whether it is "not in the dictionary" or "not this puzzle's" — and it doesn't matter.

Hints, timing and scoring

Hint, per LinkedIn's Help page, either erases your mistakes or reveals the next correct letter in the sequence. After you finish, the results page shows your score against averages for all members, your company and others, your streak, and the connections and company or school leaderboards. LinkedIn's Help page doesn't spell out how the score is calculated, so we don't guess here. The puzzle number climbs by one a day: #87 on 3 September 2026, #124 on 10 October.

What Wend is, and isn't, like

It resembles NYT Strands in that a board of letters is fully used by hidden words traced as paths. The differences are in what you're told: Strands shows a theme clue and a fixed 8-row by 6-column board in our stored puzzles, while Wend shows no theme in its rules but tells you the number and length of every word, on a grid whose size and empty cells change by day. Against a word search, Wend's words bend at any letter rather than running in straight lines, so the eye has to follow letter pairs rather than shapes.

The arithmetic, spelled out

Board size grows through the week. In our archive (37 boards, #87 on 3 September to #124 on 10 October 2026), Monday boards averaged 18.2 letters and always four words; Tuesday 20.8; Wednesday 23.6; Thursday 28.3; Friday 29.8; Saturday 37.8 with five words; Sunday 41.2 with five or six. The 3-4-5-6 board of eighteen letters is a Monday shape — four of our five Mondays used it, and the only other board with it was Wednesday 9 September.

Vowel accounting is the other check: once you are down to the last two rows, the leftover letters need enough vowels (Y counts) to make both words. If they don't, one of your placed words is wrong.

Reader questions

"Can a path go diagonally?" No — LinkedIn's rules say adjacent letters horizontally or vertically, and none of the 164 answer paths in our archive takes a diagonal step.

"Does the order I find the words in matter?" LinkedIn's Help page doesn't require one; a correct word fills whichever row matches it.

"Are proper nouns allowed?" None has appeared in our archive; every answer has been an ordinary dictionary word.

Glossary

Terms as used on this site.

• Letter cell — one of the letters on the grid; every one belongs to exactly one word.
• Empty cell — a grid cell with no letter; paths can't cross it.
• Answer row — the blank rows under the grid that show how many words there are and how long each is.
• Dead end — a letter with only one neighbouring letter; it must start or end a word.

Reader questions, second round

"Can two of the words be the same length?" Yes. On 2 October 2026 all three words had eight letters (BACKFLIP, BAREFOOT, BLOWFISH), and on 6 September all five had nine.

"How many words are there?" Between three and six in our archive: four on 20 boards, five on 12, six on 3 and three on 2.

"What happens after the last word?" The results page: your score against averages, your streak, the leaderboards and the day's discussion posts, as LinkedIn's Help page lists them.

Wend as a vocabulary workout

Wend's longest answers are ten letters — ACCENTUATE, ABSOLUTELY, MICROSCOPE, POPULATION, OPTIMISTIC and DOWNLOADED all appeared in our archive — and its longer weekend boards ask you to spot a nine- or ten-letter word from a few letters in the middle of it. That is exactly the pattern recognition Spelling Bee's pangram hunt and Strands' spangram search reward, which is why the three make a sensible daily set: Wend for paths and lengths, Strands for theme, Spelling Bee for pure letter combinations.

A note on hints

LinkedIn's Hint does two jobs, according to its Help page: it erases mistakes, or, if there are none, reveals the next correct letter in the sequence. That makes it most useful when you have a word's first letters but lose the path, and as a mistake-checker when a row refuses to fill. On a board with several dead ends, try those first: on #105 (21 September) they gave three of the four words before a hint would have been worth spending.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Wend answers

Every past puzzle is in the Wend archive. New here? Start with the Wend guide.