Word Search Puzzles: Generation Options Explained
Horizontal only for elementary school, or diagonal and backwards for true experts? The "Generate options" dialog makes your word search puzzle as easy or as tricky as you need it to be. In this article you'll get to know all the settings: the eight word directions, the fill characters, the word length filters, and more – with clear recommendations on when each setting is the right one.
In this article
- Where do you find the generation options?
- Word directions: the number one difficulty dial
- Sorting words: long words first and avoiding duplicates
- Fill characters: what the empty cells are filled with
- Umlauts and special characters: replace or remove
- Word restrictions: minimum and maximum word length
- Maximum number of words for generation
- Recommended settings for typical scenarios
Where do you find the generation options?
Open your word search project and switch to the 2. Generate area. There you can access the "Generate options" dialog – the settings window that lets you precisely control the difficulty and character of your word search puzzle.
In a word search, Puzzle-Generator hides your terms in a letter grid and fills all remaining cells with camouflage letters. The options in this dialog determine how well the words are hidden – from child's play to downright devious. And as always: every change only takes effect at the next generation run, so feel free to experiment to your heart's content.
For the complete journey from word list to finished export, we recommend the step-by-step guide Create your own word search – here we focus entirely on the generation settings.
Word directions: the number one difficulty dial
The most important setting in the entire dialog: with eight checkboxes you define in which directions words may be hidden in the grid. Every additional direction makes the puzzle harder – so the very same word list becomes either a children's puzzle or a real challenge.
The four straight directions
- Left to right: The natural reading direction – the easiest to find and the foundation of every word search puzzle.
- Top to bottom: Vertical in reading direction – also easy to spot; together with "left to right" the classic for beginners.
- Right to left: Words written backwards – considerably harder, because the eye has to search against its reading habit.
- Bottom to top: Vertical backwards – same effect: the difficulty rises noticeably.
The four diagonal directions
Diagonal words run at an angle through the grid – from top left to bottom right, bottom right to top left, top right to bottom left, or bottom left to top right. Diagonals are the hardest for the eye to scan; the two "backwards" diagonals are the most challenging hiding places of all.
How to use the directions strategically
- Easy (preschool/elementary): Only "left to right" and "top to bottom" – children experience quick wins.
- Medium (standard): The four forward directions including the two forward diagonals – varied but fair.
- Hard (experts): All eight directions including the backwards variants – this requires patience and a trained eye.
Sorting words: long words first and avoiding duplicates
Two checkboxes control how your word list is prepared before placement:
Try to incorporate long words first
Long words need the most contiguous space in the grid. If they're placed first, they almost always find a suitable spot – and the short words then easily fit into the remaining gaps. The other way around, a 14-letter word may simply find no room in an already well-filled grid.
Recommendation: Keep it enabled – especially important for small grids and long terms.
Avoid duplicate words
Ensures that each term is hidden only once in the grid – even if it accidentally appears several times in your word list. This spares your solvers confusion: nothing is more frustrating than having to tick off an already-found word a second time.
Recommendation: Keep it enabled.
Fill characters: what the empty cells are filled with
Once all search words are placed, the generator fills the remaining cells with random fill characters – the camouflage letters your words hide among. In the text field "Use the following characters to fill in the blanks" you decide yourself which character pool these letters come from.
Ready-made templates for different languages
Via the "Load from template" button you can apply a suitable character set with one click: the Latin alphabet (default) or language-specific sets for German, English, French, and Spanish – including each language's typical special letters such as ä/ö/ü, é/è, or ñ. This way, the letter noise in the grid matches the language of your search words, and hidden words don't stand out through "foreign" letters.
The expert trick with the character pool
You can also edit the character set freely – and fine-tune the difficulty with it: if you enter only the letters that actually appear in your search words, the words practically melt into their surroundings – the puzzle becomes significantly harder. For easy children's puzzles, the opposite works: a broad character pool with many rare letters makes the hidden words stand out more. Themed fun is possible too – for example a Christmas puzzle whose fill characters consist almost entirely of X, M, A, and S.
Umlauts and special characters: replace or remove
As with all puzzle types in Puzzle-Generator, you can define how umlauts and special characters in your search words are handled – two mutually exclusive options are available:
Replace umlauts and special characters (ä = ae, ß = ss, ...)
Automatically converts all umlauts and accented characters into their replacement spelling – "FRÜHLING" becomes FRUEHLING, "café" becomes CAFE. No word is lost, and the grid gets by entirely with the basic alphabet.
Recommendation: The best choice when your fill character set contains no special letters – search words and camouflage letters stay perfectly consistent.
Remove words with umlauts or special characters
The strict variant: terms with umlauts or accents are discarded entirely. Useful for strictly limited alphabets – for example in language-learning puzzles where replacement spellings would confuse the learners.
Recommendation: Only use it when replacement spellings are really disruptive. Tip: alternatively, keep the special characters and load a language template with those characters as the fill character set – then ä, ö, ü, or é are perfectly normal grid letters.
Word restrictions: minimum and maximum word length
With "Minimum word length" and "Maximum word length" you filter your word list before generation: terms that are too short or too long are removed automatically.
- Minimum word length 3–4: Very short words hardly feel like a "find" in the letter grid and often appear by pure chance multiple times – a minimum of 3, better 4, keeps the puzzle clean.
- Match the maximum word length to the grid size: A word longer than the grid is wide, tall, or (diagonally) deep cannot be hidden. In a 12×12 grid, 12 letters is the limit.
- For children: An upper limit of 8–10 letters keeps the search words manageable and easy to read.
Hands-on tip for teaching: The filter really pays off with vocabulary word searches – go ahead and import the complete vocabulary list and let the word length filter automatically sort out what fits into the grid. Read more about which learning goals word search puzzles can support in our guide.
Maximum number of words for generation
The "Max. number of words" field limits how many words the generator hides in the grid at most. It's an upper limit – if fewer words fit, the result stays below it.
The right word count depends on grid size and target audience: in a small 10×10 grid, 8–12 words feel pleasant; in a large 20×20 grid, 30 or more are fine. Too many words in too small an area cause terms to overlap heavily and leave hardly any fill characters – paradoxically making the puzzle easier, because almost every letter belongs to a search word.
Recommendation: For worksheets and children's puzzles, deliberately limit it to 10–15 words. With large imported lists, use the upper limit to automatically bring a suitable selection from hundreds of vocabulary terms into the grid.
Recommended settings for typical scenarios
Four proven setting combinations as a starting point for your next word search.
| Setting | Elementary school & children | Standard puzzle | Expert challenge | Language learning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Directions | Only → and ↓ | All 4 forward directions incl. diagonals | All 8 incl. backwards | →, ↓ and forward diagonals |
| Long words first / avoid duplicates | On / On | On / On | On / On | On / On |
| Fill characters | Latin alphabet | Language template matching the word list | Only letters of the search words | Template of the target language (EN/FR/ES) |
| Umlauts / accents | Replace | Replace | Replace | Depending on target language |
| Word length (min–max) | 4–8 | 4 up to grid width | 5 up to grid width | 3–10 |
| Max. number of words | 8–12 | 15–25 | 20–30 | 10–20 |
These values are starting points for your own experiments – every generation run shows you the result instantly. For classroom inspiration, read the article Using puzzles in the classroom; finished examples with downloads await you among the puzzle examples.
Hide your first words!
Choose directions, adjust fill characters, generate – in just a few minutes your personal word search puzzle is ready, at exactly the right difficulty level. Download Puzzle-Generator for free and try the options right away with your own word list.
Download nowBy the way: besides word searches, Puzzle-Generator also creates crosswords, Swedish-style crosswords, alphametics and more puzzle types – answers to common questions are in the FAQ.