Large print word search maker
with the words of the people in the room.

What this maker does that the others do not

There is no shortage of word search generators, and they all hand you the same sheet: a big grid, ordinary type, words running in all 8 directions. For a classroom that is right. For a group of people in their eighties it is what makes half the room put the pen down — hunting diagonally and backwards is 8 sweeps per letter instead of 2, and 11pt letters are why the sheet comes back blank.

This page applies the rules of our large-print material, the same ones that are in the printed book:

Each grid cell has about 3.1× the area of a cell in our standard-print book (60px against 34px). On either paper size the grid takes up nearly the full usable width, and what is left underneath is room to rest a hand and cross words off.

The sheet is checked before it reaches your screen

The engine that builds your grid is the same file that builds the puzzles in our paid book — copied from the repository, not rewritten for the web. Before the sheet appears, it proves three things about your grid:

• Every word on your list appears exactly once. Not zero times, not twice. Filler letters love to spawn a second copy of a short word somewhere else in the grid — that is what makes someone circle the wrong place and the answer key look wrong. The sweep looks in all 8 directions, even though words are only ever placed in 2.
• No offensive word formed by accident. A blocklist is searched across the whole grid in all 8 directions. When one turns up, the guilty filler letter is re-rolled and the check starts again. It is the error nobody spots in the PDF and everybody spots in the room.
• No word landed on a diagonal or backwards. This is not read back off the generator's settings — it is recomputed from the cells that are about to be printed, word by word. The promise is checked on the finished sheet, not on the intention.

If any of the three fails, the sheet is not shown. The number of checked words is printed under the puzzle every time you make one.

Why some words get turned down

A rejected word appears on screen with its reason. Each rule is there because of a specific way it breaks the sheet:

• Fewer than 4 or more than 8 letters. A 3-letter word turns up by accident in almost any grid; a longer one will not fit across 11 cells alongside the others.
• One word inside another. If CAT and CATHERINE are both on the list, finding one is finding the other, and "exactly once" stops meaning anything.
• A palindrome (ANNA, OTTO, HANNAH): it reads the same both ways, which confuses the single-occurrence check.
• Digits, spaces, hyphens or symbols. One letter per cell. Compound names go in without the space, or use the first name only.

K, W and Y are fine here — Kelly, Wendy and Yvonne are exactly the kind of word this page exists for. (Our Portuguese edition turns them down, because Portuguese filler letters do not include them and such a word would stand out in the grid.)

When you print it

1. Pick your paper above — US Letter or A4 — before you press Print. It sets the page size the browser sends to the printer.
2. Print at 100% scale. If the dialog offers "fit to page" or "shrink to fit", turn it off — that is exactly what undoes the large print.
3. Black and white is fine. The sheet is already black on white, with no coloured background eating ink.
4. Two pages come out: the puzzle and the answer key. Print the key once, for whoever is running the session — not one per person.
5. For a group, print the puzzles before the session starts. Counting sheets on the spot is what delays the beginning.

Print as many copies as you like — for a whole group, a care home, a memory-care unit, a day centre, a library, a classroom or at home. We ask for nothing in return and there is no watermark.