Word Search
Twelve to fourteen words in the grid. Find every one.
Got your own list? Make your own word search →
A 12×12 grid, one theme, and a list of words hiding in it. Words run in all eight directions, forwards and backwards, and they cross each other. Drag across the letters to mark one off. Your time is your score, and the puzzle ends when the last word is struck through.
How to play
- Drag across letters from the first letter of a word to its last, in a straight line. Tap-and-drag works the same on a phone.
- Words hide in all eight directions: across, down, diagonally, and any of those backwards.
- Selecting a word from either end counts. LEOPARD found tail-first is still LEOPARD.
- The word list keeps score for you. Found words get struck through and stay tinted on the grid.
- Find every word to finish. There's no way to lose, only a time to beat.
Your statistics
One puzzle a day, then as many as you want
Every day there's one puzzle that counts, the same grid and the same words for every player. Finish it and your streak grows, your time goes on the daily leaderboard, and the puzzle joins the archive.
After that the play button keeps dealing fresh grids for as long as you want them. Free word search, unlimited, no signup, and none of it touches your streak. Practice puzzles draw from the same themes as the daily, so the only difference is that nobody else is racing you on them.
Every word findable, exactly once
Random letters spell things. Fill a grid carelessly and a second RACCOON grows out of the fill, and now the copy you found first is "wrong". So before a puzzle ships, a checker scans every line of the grid in all eight directions and proves each listed word appears exactly once. If the fill grew a duplicate, the grid is refilled and checked again.
The same scan keeps the fill clean. No slur or swear word can appear in any line, in either direction, which is more than most word search generators can promise. This is a puzzle you can put in front of a classroom.
Themed grids
Each puzzle draws its words from one theme: Animals, Food, Countries, Sports, Music, Space and 6 more. Themes rotate with the daily, and the theme is your first hint. Knowing the grid is all countries narrows what that stray Q can belong to.
The vocabulary is deliberately everyday. A word search is a scanning game, not a spelling test, and finding OCELOT is satisfying in a way that finding some fourteen-letter obscurity never is.
Tips for finding words faster
- Hunt rare letters first. If the list has JAGUAR, scan for the J. Q, X, Z and W give away their words the same way.
- Scan in rows, then columns. Your eyes are much better at one direction at a time than at all eight simultaneously.
- Look for pairs. Spotting a double letter, the OO in RACCOON, filters the grid faster than looking for the whole word.
- Leave the diagonals for last. They're the hardest to see, and by then the leftover words tell you exactly what you're looking for.
- The last word is always somewhere you've already looked. It always is.
Print it if you'd rather use a pen
Any puzzle here prints cleanly: open it and use your browser's print function, and you get the grid and the word list on one page with the buttons and menus stripped away. A printable word search for a classroom, a rainy afternoon, or the kind of person who thinks better with paper. The daily, the practice grids and every archive puzzle all work this way.
More word games
When the grid runs dry, the rest of the word shelf is nearby: Wordle Unlimited for deduction, Spelling Bee Unlimited for building words against the clock, and Connections Unlimited for finding which sixteen words hide four groups. All free, and none of them need an account.