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Generator · Print-true

Word search maker

Paste your word list and get a printable word search with a matching answer key — your grid size, your difficulty, no watermark and no account. The puzzle is built in your browser at true page size, and the words you type never leave your device.

Sheet— Grid— Words— Pages— Seed—
Spaces and punctuation are stripped for the grid; the printed list keeps them.

How this generator works

Placing words in a grid is a packing problem, and this page solves it by enumeration rather than by guessing. For every word, each legal starting square and each permitted direction is checked, and every candidate is scored by how many letters it could share with words already on the grid. One of the best-scoring candidates is then taken at random. Preferring shared letters is what makes a puzzle feel dense rather than sparse, and working through the list longest-first matters because a nine-letter word placed last has almost nowhere left to go. The readout strip reports how many of your words were placed, and if one genuinely cannot fit the page names it instead of quietly leaving it off the list.

The empty squares are then filled from the letters of your own words rather than evenly from A to Z. That is a deliberate quality choice: uniform fillers scatter J, Q, X and Z across the grid, and experienced solvers read those as "not part of a word" and skip past them — a free hint the puzzle never intended to give. Drawing fillers from the puzzle's own letter frequencies gives the background the same texture as the answers. The whole sheet is SVG in real millimeters, the answer key is a second page with the words ringed and the fillers dropped to light gray, and printing goes through your browser's own dialog, so choosing "Save as PDF" as the destination produces the puzzle and the key as one file.

The honest limits. Fillers are placed without checking whether they accidentally spell one of your words somewhere else on the grid; that happens occasionally with short words on large grids, and the effect is a solver finding an extra copy, not a puzzle that cannot be solved. The hard setting includes backwards and upward directions, which is genuinely harder for young solvers — medium is the setting most classroom sheets want. Words longer than the grid are reported rather than truncated. And as with every sheet on this site, the print dialog must be at 100% or "Actual size"; "Fit to page" rescales the grid, and no generator can prevent that from outside the dialog.

Frequently asked questions

What grid size should I choose?
The grid has to be at least as wide as your longest word, and roughly one and a half times the length of your longest word makes a comfortable puzzle. Fifteen suits most classroom lists of fifteen to twenty words; go to twenty or more for longer lists, and down to ten for young solvers. If a word is longer than the grid, the page says so instead of silently dropping it.
Can I hide phrases with spaces, hyphens, or apostrophes?
Yes. Spaces, hyphens and apostrophes are stripped before placement, so "ICE CREAM" is hidden in the grid as ICECREAM — which is how word searches have always handled it — while the printed word list still shows the phrase the way you typed it. Accented letters are folded to their nearest A–Z letter, so CAFÉ is hidden as CAFE and PIÑATA as PINATA; a letter with no A–Z equivalent at all cannot go in the grid, and the page names it rather than printing a word list that disagrees with the puzzle.
Where is the answer key?
It is the second page of the printout, with every word ringed and the filler letters dropped to light gray so the solution reads at a glance. Untick "Include an answer key" if you would rather not print it — for example when you are copying class sets and want the key kept back.
Why aren't the filler letters completely random?
Because uniformly random fillers give the puzzle away. Draw evenly from A to Z and the grid fills with J, Q, X and Z, and solvers quickly learn to read those as "not part of a word" and skip past them. The fillers here are drawn from the letters of your own words, so the background has the same texture as the answers.
Is anything uploaded or stored?
No. Your word list is read by this page, laid out as vector geometry here, and printed through your browser's own dialog. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no account or watermark, and no settings are saved — close the tab and it is gone.

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