Have you ever wanted to make your own word search puzzle? It’s not as hard as you might think! In this post, we’ll give you the steps to making your own word search puzzle!

Step 1: Make a Grid

The first step is to make a grid for your words! We have an image below for you, but we also have a whole post dedicated towards blank word search templates.

To download the above image as a PDF, click here.

Step 2: Choose your words

Choosing a theme is essential to making a good word search. There are lots of themes you can use, including ones that give the opportunity for multiple puzzles, like our season-themed puzzles.

Step 3: Put the words into the grid

The next step is to put your words into the grid. If you’re making a kid’s puzzle (like these ones), it’s a good idea to make sure words are oriented in a way that’s fairly easy to find. Usually that means putting them left-to-right and top-to-bottom, but not diagonally or backwards. If your puzzle is for adults, feel free to put words in every direction! You can also overlap letters to make it trickier (people tend to look for distinct words).

To download the above image as a PDF, click here.

Step 4: Fill in other letters

Of course a word search would be easy if it looked like the image above! The final step is to insert random letters around your words. An easy way to do this is to go letter by letter through the alphabet and put one of each letter in until you get to ‘Z’, and then repeat. You could also add more of the more common letters, like ‘E’ or ‘S’ to make it more like a professional puzzle.

Need more tips? Here’s another post on how to make word searches. If you don’t want to do the manual work of making your own puzzle, there are tons of free puzzle-making sites out there. This one is easy to use and completely free!