What are the best word puzzles? It’s a question that seems to come up with regularity. And why not? Word puzzles are fun, practical, and can help improve your language skills, which of course, is a good thing! But how do you know which puzzle to buy? Here we take a look at a few popular styles.
Crosswords
One of the most popular word puzzles around, crosswords are fun and valuable. Why what’s so great about them? Well, firstly, word crosswords are an excellent way to teach children practical linguistic skills and a fun way of building up their vocabulary. What, exactly, have we, learners, traditionally been interested in? Well, for one thing, word crosswords are a perfect way to teach kids about space, time, and spelling – without them having to sit there and answer a bunch of questions that don’t make sense. Many kids get confused by the concept of a ‘word puzzle,’ and using crosswords to learn these things can help them develop their problem-solving skills in this area.
Wordsearch
If you’ve never heard of this brand, it’s simply a free online word game that a player receives letters from a square. You then try to find the correct word from the list by finding pairs of adjacent letters in each group of letters. Sounds easy enough, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. With a bit of practice, players can get to grips with all the rules of the game and start to develop their spelling and word-finding skills. Because the game is entirely based on letters, the laws of English grammar are also very easily explained.
Jumbline 2
This is an entirely different take on the classic Word puzzles. As the name suggests, it’s a jigsaw puzzle where you’re required to place all of the letters in a square grid. The task isn’t quite so much finding words as trying to fit those letters into a square that doesn’t already contain those letters. With a simple system of directional keys, you can move your pieces around freely and see where they land.
Wordsearch
As the name suggests, word searches are essentially word puzzles. Players have a set of letter tiles that they must use to find a particular word. Unlike regular word searches where the puzzle’s layout does not constrain you, word searches require that you think in 3 dimensions (down, up, and both). As long as you can find words by looking at a list of tiles, you’ll be fine. But like the official game of Sudoku, it’s a little too simplified for a real work of this level.
Worldwide – This one on the list may very well be my personal favorite among word puzzle fanatics. If you’ve played any of the more popular puzzle game websites, then you know what I’m talking about. Worldwide is nothing more than a very polished version of Scrabble. Instead of using tiles to form words, you’ll be using a grid of seven spaces (red, yellow, black, blue, right, bottom) to write your way through the missing spaces.
Free Word Games Online
There are some elegant things about playing word games online. One of the best of these is a site called Wordtracker. As the name implies, this site has a database of over 35 million words. Rather than having you trawl through hundreds or even thousands of lists to find interesting words, Wordtracker takes a list of the comments from Wikipedia and other sources and spits out a list of words that might be interesting to you. Not only that, but Wordtracker is one of the most updated and frequently visited sites when it comes to word puzzles and other word games.
WordSearch
This is an elegant app that allows you to type in a particular set of words, and it will give you suggestions for other words in the same set of words. For example, if you wanted to create a maze, you could type “maze,” “ladder,” and “door,” and then it would give you a list of all the words in those mazes. Now, it’s entirely possible that you won’t come across all the words you were looking for – particularly if you’re looking for something like an essay question, which many people use for their exams.
Conclusion;
However, if you do come across several good ones, it’s undoubtedly worth it taking the time to make your suggestion and see whether the correct answer is correct. WordSearch is a perfect free app, but if you want the feature-packed version, you should check out the two other options:
