What this is for
A word search maker solves a very specific problem: you have a list of words — this unit’s vocabulary, the names of a group, this week’s irregular verbs — and you want an activity with them in two minutes, not in half an hour of cutting up grids.
Type the words, pick the size, done. The printed sheet comes out clean: just the title, the grid and the word list. No menus, none of this text and no advertising, which has no business on paper.
How to choose the size
The rule of thumb: the side has to be at least two letters longer than your longest word, and from there add according to how many words you have. With ten short words, 12×12 is plenty. With twenty words or one of ten letters, go to 15×15 or more.
The bigger the grid, the harder the puzzle, because there are more filler letters to get lost in. For young children, keep the grid tight: high word density means things get found early. For adults, the opposite.
Three things this maker does and others do not
- It warns you if a word does not fit. By name. It is the commonest failure of automatic generators and the hardest to spot by looking at the sheet.
- It fills in with realistic letters. The gaps follow English letter frequency. With random letters you get K, W and X everywhere, and then the real words stand out at a glance because they are the only stretches that look normal.
- The solution is marked with an outline when printing, not with colour. On a black and white printer a green background comes out dark grey and hides the letter.
Ideas for using it
In class: language vocabulary, capital cities, chemical elements, characters from a set text. In a care home or a memory workshop: broad semantic fields (flowers, trades, foods), which work best because every word found brings something to mind. At a party: the guests’ names, which tends to go further than you would expect.
And if what you want is ready-made grids, there are the online word searches with 45 themed puzzles, and the other printables.