How To Make Your Own Word Search Puzzles

Almost everyone likes word search puzzles, right? Here’s a bit of trivia: word searches are also known as word find, word seek, word sleuth or mystery word puzzles. Basically, they’re letters arranged in a grid and your task is to find all of the hidden words. Interestingly, the first word search puzzle appears in a digest sometime in 1968!

Today, you can easily make your own word search puzzles instead of waiting for a new one to appear in your local newspaper or favourite digest. The Internet affords a simple way of creating your very own word search puzzles with your own words and clues. There are, I’m sure, many sites to choose from when it comes to making your own word puzzles but this article will focus on one, mainly because it offers a nice list of different word-related puzzles you can create.

Here’s how you can make your own word search puzzles online. Have fun!

Build your own word search with DiscoveryEducation’s puzzle maker

DiscoveryEducation.com has a free puzzlemaker page with 10 different puzzles you can create, most of them having to do with words making them nice to include on fliers and other publications. The site makes the creation of these puzzles very simple. Let’s go ahead and make a few to demonstrate how simple it is to make your own word search puzzles.

As previously mentioned, a word search is a puzzle where you are given a square made up of what looks like random letters. Here’s an example of what one would look like (in case you haven’t seen one before):

The object is to find each word on the list hidden in the box of letters. Circle each word to keep track.

Design your own word search puzzle

Making your own word search puzzle consists of three parts: the title, the size of puzzle, and the list of hidden words. The word search creator is as simple as filling out a form containing each of those parts, including a few more settings to make the puzzle perfect for you.

The process of making your own word search puzzle is broken down into six easy steps:

1. Enter a title of the word search
2. Enter the size you want your word search puzzle to be (measured by number of letters)
3. Puzzle options: Do you want to use each letter only once, share letters occasionally, or share them as much as possible?
4. Output type: You can choose from HTML (if you plan to print it directly from your browser), text (for better formatting options once pasted into a project), and lowercase text.
5. Enter the words making sure you separate them with spaces, commas, or put a new word on each line.
6. Proofread the puzzle once generated. The app has filters in place to try to weed out offensive words that may be generated by accident. If you want to regenerate the word search puzzle, just click the back button and have it regenerated.

The free puzzle maker tool gives you the ability to create 10 different types of puzzles including: word search, criss-cross, double puzzles, fallen phrases, math squares, mazes, letter tiles, cryptograms, number blocks, and hidden message. Give them each a try. The instructions for each are just as easy to follow as the word search instructions.

Now that you know how to make your own word search puzzles, what kind of creative uses can you come up with for them?