I once spend more time than I want to admit constructing the best possible 10-square in Dutch[1]. There are also some other forms that are fun, like cubes[2], or hypercubes. Or using bigrams. Or hexagonal tiles. And so forth.
Finding solutions for big squares/wordlists in reasonable time is actually not a trivial algorithmic problem. Neither is making good wordlists, I ended up creating what is essentially a Dutch version of the Pile[3] just to collect words. Good fun.
I spend months collecting the dataset to create a wordlist. And I also spend 100+ hours just judging squares and words. And eventually also training char-level LLM's to do that job for me. In Dutch you can compound and there is quite an active morphology so it can be really tricky to judge whether a given word is any good.
Since I worked on it on and off, and also did a bunch other related things I'm not sure, but I would be surprised if I spend any less than 1000+ hours on these silly word-games.
