Hidden Word Puzzles

Many people, including both adults and children, get a big kick out of solving puzzles. One common type of puzzle that you may have encountered are "hidden word puzzles" (sometimes known as "word search puzzles" or "mystery word puzzles"). The goal in these is to find words hidden within a grid of letters. The words can begin at any position grid and go off in any straight line direction including horizontally (either forwards or backwards), vertically (downwards or upwards), or any diagonal direction.

While the goal of such puzzles is easy to understood, solving them can nevertheless be quite a challenge. The apparent simplicity of these puzzles tends to make them particularly attractive to children, which is a good thing, because such puzzles can introduce children to new words and also help them to learn the spellings of words that they already know.

If you simply want to have a go at solving such a puzzle, you can of course buy books or magazines full of them. However, if you want to publish a hidden word puzzle in a newsletter or magazine, you can not legally just copy one from a book, so you will need to create your own. Another reason for creating your own puzzles, one that tends to be particularly important to teachers, is that you can then choose exactly what words will appear within the puzzle grid.

When these puzzles were first invented, they were no doubt created entirely by hand. However, this is no doubt tedious and time consuming, so a modern alternative is called for. The answer is to use your computer, because with the help of suitable hidden word puzzle maker software, it is very easy to create such puzzles: simply enter a list of words and the computer can make you a new unique puzzle with just a few mouse clicks.