Letter Board Word Hunt Generator

What this generator does

Writes words onto the grid along paths of touching squares, fills the gaps, then searches the finished board from scratch and reports every word of the list it can find.

How to use this tool

1. Choose a board size and how many words you would like promised.
2. Print or copy the grid and start tracing.
3. A word may turn at every letter, and may go diagonally, but no square may be used twice.
4. Show the words to check, then pick one to see the path it takes.
5. Play against a timer, or against someone else's list, if you want a game rather than a puzzle.

Understanding the controls

Board

Four to six squares a side. A four-square board is the fiddly one to build, because there is so little room to lay a word in.

Words promised

The floor, not the total. A board asked for six usually holds twenty or more, because the filler spells words by accident and those count.

Seed (optional)

Type anything to rebuild the same board later, which is how you reprint a sheet or set the same round for two groups. A seed is deterministic, not cryptographic.

Common use cases

• A literacy warm-up built on the sight words a class is already learning
• A word game where the answer key is complete rather than a sample
• A timed round for two players, scoring a point for each word found
• A quiet activity page that needs no equipment beyond a pencil
• Reprinting the identical board later from its seed

How this generator works

The words come from the sight-word lists already published on this site — the Dolch lists and Fry's, both long out of copyright — kept to words of three letters or more, since a grid of any size holds dozens of the shorter ones and counting those would make the promise generous rather than meaningful. Words are written onto the board along paths of touching squares, sharing a square where the letters agree. The gaps are then filled with letters drawn from the frequencies of that same list, so nothing on the board comes from a table someone made up. And then the important step: the finished board is searched, by a routine given only the letters and the list, and what it finds is what gets printed. Words that were written in and later overwritten do not count; words the filler produced by accident do. Every word in the key also carries the path it runs along, and each path is re-walked on the board before the sheet is shown.

Randomness and fairness

Which words are chosen, where they are laid and every filler letter come from your browser's cryptographic random source. Give a seed and the same board comes back — which is how two people race on identical grids. That is what a seed is for: reproducibility, not cryptographic strength.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

• Only sight words count. A board will contain many ordinary English words that are not on the list and are not in the key.
• Words of one or two letters are ignored, so a very short find is not a find here.
• The board stops at six squares a side, which is about as much as anyone wants to hunt through by eye.
• The number promised is a floor and the board usually beats it, so two boards asked for the same number are not equally hard.

Privacy and your data

The board and its word list are worked out in your browser. Nothing you type as a seed, and no board made from it, leaves the device.