How to Make Your Own Large Print Word Search

Updated October 2026 · A step-by-step guide for families and activity directors

A store-bought puzzle book can't know your grandchildren's names, the street you grew up on, or the hymns your church group loves. A homemade word search can. Making one in true large print is mostly a matter of picking the right sizes before you start — here's how to do it by hand or in Microsoft Word, with the exact numbers that keep letters big on paper.

Step 1: Pick a theme and write the word list

Word searches have been personal from the very beginning. Norman E. Gibat, the Oklahoma printer usually credited with publishing the first one in 1968, built his earliest puzzles from Oklahoma town names and the streets of his own city. The same idea works beautifully today:

• Family: grandchildren, cousins, pets, a family recipe's ingredients.
• A place: your hometown's streets, the lake where everyone summered, the stops on a favorite road trip.
• An occasion: a birthday (guests' names), a reunion, an anniversary, a retirement party.
• A group: residents' hometowns, a club's favorite outings, this month's events at the senior center.

Then shape the list with a few simple rules:

• Keep words between 3 and 12 letters — and never longer than the grid is wide.
• Drop the spaces. "Ice Cream" becomes ICECREAM in the grid. You can still print it with a space in the word list; solvers know the convention.
• Avoid words hidden inside other words. If both ROSE and ROSEMARY are on the list, ROSE gets found twice. The same goes for plurals: pick BIRD or BIRDS, not both.
• Mix long and short. Four or five long words give the grid its backbone; short words fill the gaps.

Step 2: Decide which ways the words can run

This choice sets the difficulty more than anything else:

• Gentle: words read only left to right and top to bottom — the way we read every day.
• Classic: add diagonals that run downward to the right. Our own packs also allow one upward diagonal, still reading left to right.
• Hard: words can run backwards and upside down, in all eight directions.

For a comfortable large print puzzle we skip backwards words entirely. Hunting for a word spelled right to left is a different and far more tiring task — which is why large print puzzle books so often list "no backwards words" as a feature. Forward-only words keep the hunt pleasant without making it trivial.

Step 3: Choose sizes that keep it large print

The American Printing House for the Blind treats 18-point type and up as large print; 14 to 16 point counts only as "enlarged" print. So 18 point is the floor, and a little bigger is better for grid letters, which sit closer together than words in a sentence. On a standard US Letter page, these combinations fit with comfortable margins:

For the letters themselves, choose a plain, bold, sans-serif font: Arial and Verdana are on nearly every computer, and Atkinson Hyperlegible is a free font from the Braille Institute, designed so that easily confused letters look clearly different. It's the font we use in our packs, and Google Docs offers it under "More fonts." Use capital letters in the grid — that's the word search convention, and capitals keep every row an even height.

Method 1: By hand on graph paper

No computer needed, and the result has a lovely handmade feel.

1. Get half-inch graph paper. Free printable graph paper is easy to find online, or draw a grid with a ruler. Fifteen half-inch squares span 7½ inches — just right for a Letter page.
2. Outline your grid — 12 × 12 or 15 × 15 squares — and leave room below it for the word list.
3. Pencil in the long words first, spread around the grid. Let words cross where they share a letter; it makes the puzzle feel woven together.
4. Fill the empty squares with random capitals. A trick that works well: borrow letters from your own word list, so the filler looks like it belongs.
5. Ink it. Go over every letter with a dark felt-tip pen, one capital centered in each square, then erase the pencil.
6. Write the word list under the grid in big, clear capitals, in two or three columns.

Photocopy the page before anyone solves it. Then circle the words on the original in a bright color, and it becomes your answer key.

Method 2: In Microsoft Word (or Google Docs)

A table makes a perfect grid: every letter gets its own square, and the sizes stay exact. These steps use the 15 × 15 full-page sizes; swap in the numbers from the table above for a smaller grid.

1. Make room: Layout → Margins → Narrow (half-inch margins).
2. Insert the grid: Insert → Table → Insert Table…, then enter 15 columns and 15 rows.
3. Size the squares: click the small four-way arrow at the table's top-left corner to select the whole table, right-click, and choose Table Properties.
   • Row tab: check Specify height, enter 0.45", and set "Row height is" to Exactly.
   • Column tab: check Preferred width and enter 0.45".
   • Cell tab: vertical alignment Center.
   • Table tab: alignment Center, then Options… — set the cell margins to 0 and uncheck "Automatically resize to fit contents," so Word keeps your squares square.
4. Set the letters: with the table still selected, choose Arial (or your large print font), size 20, Bold, and centered.
5. Type the words in, one letter per square — the Tab key jumps to the next square, and the arrow keys move up and down. Place your long words first, then fill every empty square with a random letter.
6. Tidy the lines: Table Design → Borders → No Border, then Outside Borders for a clean frame.
7. Add the word list below the table at 16 point or larger, in two or three columns.

In Google Docs the idea is the same: Insert → Table to pick the grid size, then right-click → Table properties to set the column width and minimum row height to 0.45 inch and the cell vertical alignment to the middle. Keep the cell padding small so 20-point letters fit without stretching the rows.

Making the answer key

Save your finished puzzle, then save a copy under a new name. In the copy, select the squares of each hidden word and apply yellow shading (Table Design → Shading). Print it as a separate page — and keep it in a folder, so peeking stays friendly.

Online word search makers

Free online generators will place the words and fill the grid for you, which is handy for a quick puzzle. Before you print one for large print use, check four settings: can you choose the letter size (look for 18 point or bigger)? Can you turn off backwards words? Does it print one puzzle per page? And does it make an answer key? Many generators default to small letters and all eight directions, so a quick look at the options makes a big difference.

Test it before you hand it out

• Solve it once yourself, or better, have someone else solve it with fresh eyes.
• Check that every word appears exactly once. Short words like AUNT can sneak into the random filler by accident, and then a solver finds two.
• Read the filler rows for accidental words you'd rather not print.
• Print at Actual size (100%). "Fit to page" quietly shrinks your carefully chosen letters — our printing guide shows where that setting hides.

Once it's printed, the word search tips we share with solvers make a nice little instruction card to tuck in with a gift puzzle.

Short on time? Start with ours

If you'd rather print than build, our free packs are made to exactly these specs: 20-point letters on 15 × 15 grids, 18 words per puzzle, no backwards words, and an answer key in the back. Try the Garden Word Search or the 1950s Nostalgia Word Search — 15 puzzles each, no email required. And if you run a group, our activity guide has ideas for mixing homemade puzzles with ready-made ones.