Word Search
In short: give Quizzz a short vocabulary list — typed by hand, loaded from a template, or drafted by AI — and it hides the words in a letter grid. Students find each one by tapping its first and last letter. No design work, no tokens spent unless you use the AI assist.
A word search is one question: a grid of letters hiding your target vocabulary among filler characters. It plays like any other quiz — assign it, share a link, embed it — and grades on how many of the words a student found.
Create one
- Open Quizzz ↗ → New Quiz and pick the Word Search tile.
- Pick the vocabulary language — Word Search currently supports Chinese, Japanese, English, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese. If a ready-made template exists for that language, one click loads it (and its title) so you have something playable immediately.
- Enter your target words, one per line — 4 to 10 words. Word length is checked per language: 2–4 characters for Chinese/Japanese/Korean, 2–8 letters for the Latin-script languages.
- Don't have a list yet? Use Generate the word list with AI: give it a topic (e.g. "Campus life") or switch to Material and paste lesson text/notes. Review the generated words — you can still edit them — before saving.
- Choose what students see while playing, under Student hints:
- Show the word list — students see the target list and their progress against it (good for beginners).
- Discovery mode: hide the word list — students find words with no list to check against; the review after submitting still reveals every answer.
- Check the live preview as you type — it confirms how many words were generated and builds the grid. Words can overlap, cross, and share letters just like a normal word search.
- Click Save word search. It's added to your quiz library like any other quiz, ready to assign, share a link for, or embed.
What students see
Word Search only plays in Classic mode — Guided and Interactive don't apply to a search grid. Finding a word takes exactly two taps: the first letter, then the last letter — the cells in between join up on their own. Words can run horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and may be written backwards, so students should check both directions before giving up on one. A found word is marked as found immediately; the summary shows how many of the total words they've found so far, and (in Discovery mode) the review afterward reveals every answer regardless of what was found.
Good to know
Quizzz checks every word you type against a few structural rules before it will let you save, so a puzzle can never be silently unplaceable:
- Length — too short or too long for the selected language's script (see the bounds above) is rejected with the specific word named.
- Duplicates — the same word twice is rejected.
- One word hidden inside another (e.g. 中文 inside 中文課) makes the longer word impossible to place no matter how big the grid is, so Quizzz rejects the conflict up front and tells you which two words clash — keep one, drop the other.
- One word spelled backwards is another word on your list (e.g. 上山 and 山上) — same problem, same fix: keep one, remove the other.
- Wrong script for the selected language (e.g. Latin letters in a Chinese list) is also rejected.
Other things worth knowing:
- Manual entry and templates never use AI credits. Generate the word list with AI draws on your plan's monthly AI quota, same as regular quiz generation.
- You can also download a word search as a printable PDF worksheet from the quiz's Download action, same as any quiz (the furigana/pinyin toggle is hidden for word searches — there's no running text to annotate).
Next
- Want a puzzle with clues instead of a plain vocabulary list? See Crossword Puzzle.
- Want AI to draft the list from your own material? Same idea as AI Quiz Generation, applied to a word search.
- Choose how you hand it out → Exam Modes.
- Open Quizzz ↗ to build your first word search.