Hard Word Searches

These are the puzzles the site itself labels hard, taken from every topic in the library. A puzzle earns the label by hiding its words in all eight directions and being either a large grid or a long list — and most of these are both.

In practice that means grids averaging around 18×19 and lists of twenty-odd words, with the largest running to 40×40 and past a hundred words to find. Words read up, down, left, right and along both diagonals, so no single sweep of the grid will turn them all up; hunting one starting letter at a time is the method that works.

All of them are free to play in the browser or to print, and each one has an answer key page for the word that will not give itself up.

The hand-picked set

This page is a difficulty view: it reaches across all 39 topics and collects whatever qualifies. The catalogue also has a topic of its own called Hard Word Searches — a smaller set filed there deliberately rather than by the measurements of the grid.

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