Word searches from your own words
Type any list — spelling words, names, vocabulary, things to spot on a journey. Every word is checked to appear exactly once, so the answer key is never wrong.
Your word list never leaves this device
The mistake most word search generators make
Placing the words is the easy part. What catches generators out is the filler: once the words are in, the empty cells are filled with random letters — and those letters can spell one of the puzzle's own words by accident. Now the word appears twice, a solver circles the one the answer key does not know about, and they are told they are wrong.
It is not rare. On a fifteen-by-fifteen grid with eight directions there are well over a thousand places a four-letter word could turn up, and short words drawn from the same alphabet as the filler collide often.
So the filler is not trusted. Once the grid is complete, every word is searched for across all eight directions and must be found exactly once. If any word appears twice, the filler is redrawn and checked again.
The filler letters are also drawn from the letters already in your words rather than uniformly from the alphabet. A grid where the only Q, X and Z sit inside the hidden words gives them away at a glance.
For teachers and parents
Type the week's spelling list and print it. No account, no watermark, no limit, and the list itself never leaves your machine — which matters more than it sounds when the list is a class of children's names.
The difficulty comes from the directions rather than the grid size. Easy runs across and down only and never backwards, which suits early readers who are still reading left to right by habit. Medium adds diagonals but still no reversals. Hard uses all eight, including backwards, which is a genuinely different skill.
What makes a good list
Words between four and nine letters work best. Very short words are hard to place without the filler accidentally recreating them elsewhere, and very long ones constrain the grid so much that everything else has to fit around them.
Twelve to twenty words fills a page nicely. More than that and the grid grows faster than you would expect, because it has to hold every word without overlapping badly.
Related
Maze generator, bingo cards, and the worksheet generator.
Questions people actually ask
Can a word appear twice by accident?
It can in most generators, and that is exactly what this one checks for. After the filler letters go in, every word is searched for across all eight directions and must be found exactly once — if the filler has recreated one somewhere, the filler is redrawn. Without that check a solver can circle a real occurrence the answer key does not know about.
Is my word list uploaded?
No. The whole thing runs in your browser. That matters more than it sounds when the list is a class of children's names or something else you would not paste into a random website.
What length of words works best?
Four to nine letters. Very short words are hard to place without the filler accidentally recreating them elsewhere, and very long ones constrain the grid so much that everything else has to fit around them.
Why did it skip one of my words?
Either it had fewer than two letters once punctuation was stripped, or it was already in the list. Whatever was skipped is listed underneath with the reason rather than silently dropped.
Are the filler letters random?
Drawn from the letters in your own words rather than uniformly from the alphabet, plus a little of everything so the pool is never one repeated letter. A grid where the only Q, X and Z sit inside the hidden words gives them away at a glance.