Word search maker

What the difficulty setting changes

Easy hides words left-to-right and top-to-bottom only, which is right for children who are still reading in one direction. Medium adds the two downward diagonals. Hard adds every backwards direction, so a word can run right-to-left or bottom-to-top — eight directions in all. The grid size stays the same; only the hiding places change.

Printing it

Press Print or save as PDF and the page strips itself back to the puzzle — no navigation, no form, no colour to drain your cartridge. The answer key prints on its own sheet, so you can hand out the first page and keep the second. In the print dialog, choose Save as PDF as the destination if you want a file to email instead.

Getting a tighter grid

Leave the size on Fit to the words and the grid is only as big as it needs to be — it grows on its own if a word won't fit. Words share letters where they cross, so a list with a lot of common letters packs in more tightly. If a word is reported as not fitting, it is longer than one side of the grid; pick a larger size and it will go in.

Two things this will not do

It will not hide a word twice. If the random filler letters happen to spell one of your words somewhere else, the grid is redrawn until they don't — otherwise the answer key would point at the wrong place. And it won't keep your list: nothing is uploaded or stored, so copy it somewhere if you want it next week.

Making the other kind of puzzle

The crossword maker takes the same list plus a clue for each word. The word scrambler jumbles a list for a quick warm-up sheet, and the word unscrambler is for solving one.

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