Word Search

What comes out of the printer is not what is on the screen

The sheet is not a screenshot. On the way to paper the board drops the ring around every run already found, the bold goes back to normal weight, the struck-through entries in the word list come back as plain words and the tick beside them disappears. A grid half solved on screen prints as an unsolved puzzle, which is the only version worth handing to somebody else. The timer and the New grid button are dropped as well; the grid, the word list and the found count are what remain.

The grid is held to fifteen centimetres across and told not to break across a page boundary, so it arrives whole on one sheet with its word list underneath, rather than as twelve rows on page one and one row stranded on page two.

There is no file, so no two sheets have to match

There is no puzzle file, and nothing is stored. The board is assembled in the page out of a list of twenty-five British mammals, thirteen of which go into the grid each time. Print it, press New grid, print again, and the second sheet is a different puzzle hiding a different thirteen. Most of what a search for a word search printable returns is one image drawn once and served to everybody, which is fine until you want a second one, or a third for the other child.

This grid and the animal grid are the same puzzle

Worth saying plainly rather than letting you find out by playing both. This page and the animal page ask the generator for the same thing: the same twenty-five British mammals, the same thirteen-wide board, the same middle direction setting – four of the eight directions, being along a row, down a column, and the two diagonals that travel rightwards, one of them descending and one climbing. Neither is a variation on the other and neither hides anything the other does not.

What differs is what is written around the grid. This page is about the object – how it prints, the three ways a run can be claimed, and why there is no button anywhere that will show you a word. The animal page is about the list: why FOX and BAT are the two names that make a themed grid hard to build honestly, why no word on the list may contain another, and what a generator that packs its words longest-first quietly does to a puzzle. Press New grid on either of them and you get a different thirteen out of the same twenty-five.

Three ways to claim a word, and no way to be shown one

Drag across the run of letters. Or tap the first letter and then the last, which is the only gesture that really works on a phone, where a cell on a thirteen-wide grid is narrower than a fingertip. Or move with the arrow keys and press Enter at each end of the run. Escape abandons a selection you did not mean to start. A run that spells nothing on the list flashes and the line under the grid says Still hidden; the counter above the grid keeps score and the timer counts up from the moment the letters appear.

There is nothing on the board that will show you where a word is. In a word search there is nothing to deduce, so a button of that kind could only read out the answer, and the way out of a grid you have stopped enjoying is a different grid. Harder and easier grids have pages of their own: fifteen by fifteen with every direction in play, and a winter grid that hides everything left to right or straight down.