How to make a word search
Making a word search is easy. Making a good one — one that takes the right amount of time, resists just enough, and doesn't fall apart in the last two words — takes a handful of decisions that most generators make for you without telling you. Here's the fast route first, and then the decisions, so you can overrule them.
The fast way (about two minutes)
- Open the puzzle maker.
- Paste your list of words, one per line.
- Pick a grid size and which directions words can run.
- Generate, check it, print or share.
Free, no account, and it produces an answer key alongside the puzzle. If that's all you needed, go. If your last attempt came out too easy or wouldn't fit, the rest of this page is about why.
Step 1: Choose your words
The word list decides more about the finished puzzle than any setting does.
How many
Twelve to twenty words is the sweet spot for a 15×15 grid. Under ten and the grid looks empty and solves in three minutes. Over about thirty on a standard grid and the words start crossing so heavily that the puzzle becomes fiddly rather than hard — and the generator will start refusing to place them.
A rough guide: aim for the hidden words to cover somewhere between a third and a half of the grid's cells. A 15×15 grid has 225 cells, so 15 words averaging 7 letters gives you 105 letters — about 47% coverage before overlaps. That's a well-packed puzzle.
How long
Four to ten letters. This is where most people's intuition is backwards: long words are easier to find than short ones. A ten-letter word only fits in a handful of places on the grid, and once a solver catches any two of its letters the rest is forced. A three-letter word fits almost everywhere, and short letter runs turn up in the filler by accident constantly, so solvers keep finding false matches. If you want a puzzle to resist, use words of moderate length — not giants.
The letters in them matter
A word containing J, Q, X or Z is a beacon. Those letters are rare in English, so a solver's eye locks onto them and the word falls out immediately. Hide JAZZ in a grid and it will be the first word found every time.
The words that hide well are the ones built entirely from common letters — SILENT, RETAIN, STONE, EASTER, LANTERN. They dissolve into the surrounding letters because everything around them is made of the same stuff.
Words to avoid
- Words contained inside other words on your list. If you hide both CAT and CATALOGUE, solvers will find CAT inside CATALOGUE and cross off the wrong one.
- Words sharing long prefixes — BEAR, BEARD, BEARDED — for the same reason, plus needless irritation.
- Anything with spaces, hyphens or apostrophes, unless your maker handles them. Most strip them, so ICE CREAM becomes ICECREAM and DON'T becomes DONT. Decide that deliberately rather than discovering it in the printout.
- Words nobody in your audience knows. A word search is not a vocabulary test; if the solver can't hold the word in mind they can't hunt for it.
Short of ideas? The topic hubs are effectively ready-made word lists — animals, food, geography, holidays — and you can lift one wholesale.
Step 2: Size the grid
The grid must be at least one cell longer on each side than your longest word, and realistically several cells longer or the placement gets cramped.
| Audience | Grid | Words |
|---|---|---|
| Young children | 8×8 – 10×10 | 6–10 |
| General / classroom | 12×12 – 15×15 | 12–20 |
| Adults, a proper challenge | 15×15 – 20×20 | 20–30 |
One thing worth knowing before you reach for a huge grid: doubling the sides quadruples the cells. A 20×20 has four times the area of a 10×10. If you don't also increase the word count, you haven't made the puzzle harder — you've made it emptier, and mostly longer. Size and difficulty are different dials.
Step 3: Set the directions
This is the difficulty control that matters most, and it's the one people leave on default.
- Horizontal and vertical, forward only (2 directions). The gentlest setting. Words read normally, so a solver's eye can pick them up while simply reading across the grid. Right for young children and for anyone who wants a relaxing puzzle.
- Add diagonals, still forward (4 directions). A clear step up. Diagonal reading isn't natural, so it needs deliberate scanning.
- All eight directions, backwards included. The hard setting. A reversed word can't be read at all — the solver has to spot it letter by letter, which defeats the whole-word recognition that makes the easier settings quick.
The jump is bigger than it looks. With two directions, a solver checking any given cell has two possible lines running out of it. With eight, there are eight — four times the ground to cover from every starting point.
Step 4: Fill the empty cells
Once the words are placed, the leftover cells need letters, and how you choose them is the difference between an amateur puzzle and a professional one.
Uniform random letters (A–Z with equal probability) make a puzzle easier, which surprises most people. English doesn't use its alphabet evenly — J, Q, X and Z are rare. Fill randomly and your grid ends up sprinkled with Qs and Zs that no hidden word contains. Each one is a bright landmark that a solver's eye can dismiss instantly, and the whole grid becomes visually lumpy and easy to parse.
Filler drawn from the letters of your own word list makes it harder. If your words are heavy in E, A, R, S and T, fill the grid with the same distribution. Now the grid is visually uniform, every letter is a plausible start to a target word, and the solver has no shortcuts. This single change does more for difficulty than adding fifty cells.
Good makers handle this for you — ours samples filler from your word list's own letter distribution — but if you're doing it by hand, the rule is: look at your words, and use those letters.
Step 5: Solve your own puzzle before you share it
Non-negotiable, and about ninety seconds well spent. You're checking for three things:
- Accidental words. Filler letters sometimes spell one of your target words by chance, in a place your answer key doesn't know about. Solvers find these and get annoyed.
- Words that ended up trivially placed — straight down the left edge, or across row one. Regenerate; most makers reshuffle placements each time.
- The clock. If it takes you a minute, it'll take your audience four. If it takes you ten, some of them will give up. Compare against a puzzle at the level you're aiming for — our easy and hard sets are useful calibration.
Common problems and what caused them
"It was over in two minutes." Filler letters were random rather than drawn from your words; and/or the direction set was forward-only; and/or the words were long and distinctive.
"The generator won't fit all my words." Grid too small, or a word longer than the grid, or too many long words competing for the same diagonals. Add two cells to each side, or cut the longest word.
"Nobody could read the printout." Set a bigger cell size before printing, or start from a large print template. If it's for a class, print one and look at it from the back row.
Ready? Open the maker, paste your list and go. And if you want to understand the difficulty dials properly before you set them, what makes a word search hard takes the mechanics apart.