Whirlwind WordSearch Lite
macOS / Education
Whirlwind WordSearch Lite is a word search puzzle maker that creates and prints uniquely engaging word search puzzles from your own lists of words. It is not just a pretty puzzle-maker though, underneath is a powerful puzzle-generating engine. It offers many different shapes, sizes, fonts, languages, and difficulty levels. It quietly removes any randomly created "naughty words". It lets you easily save royalty-free puzzles for publishing in your books, blogs or newsletters. All of this for free... no monthly fees, no sudden updating costs. Ever.
This is the Lite version of Whirlwind WordSearch, which contains many of the features of the Full and Pro versions.
Here's a list of features that make Whirlwind WordSearch Lite an outstanding puzzle-generator.
• Easily customize your puzzles, choosing different colors, fonts, and sizes for the puzzle letters and titles. Choose to draw cell grid lines or not, or just draw an outline around the puzzle.
• Choose from many built-in puzzle shapes: Square, Circle, UL-Wedge, LR-Wedge, Round Peg-Square Hole, Mushroom. The Full and Pro versions have many more.
• Create puzzles ranging in size from 9x9 to 18x18. Full version goes from 5x5 to 50x50, Pro goes up to 80x80.
• Create word puzzles with words in English, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese-Hiragana, Japanese-Katakana, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit-Latin, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh.
• Create number puzzles too, using Arabic numbers or Chinese/Japanese numbers.
• All created puzzles are yours! Publish and make money with them… there are no copyright restrictions or restrictive “commercial use” clauses!
• Work without a net... you never need an internet connection to create, save, and print your puzzles.
* Your work is safely yours. Your puzzles stay on your computer. Whirlwind WordSearch never requires you to create an account and never stores any of your information in the cloud.
• Bulk-Export up to 100 different puzzles at a time, using the Bulk-Builder in the Pro version.
* Change the Difficulty Mode" simply by moving a slider from "easy" puzzles to "hard" puzzles, without worrying about all the details of how it works. The Full version allows more difficulty controls.
• Export high-quality puzzles and answer keys to a number of different file formats, ready for web, newsletters, worksheets, books, or other publications. Supports PNG. The Full version also supports PDF, JPEG, SVG, and ipuz file formats.
• Use compound-words with spaces, dashes or apostrophes (O'Hara), or use entire phrases (May The Force Be With You).
• Pour lots of words into your word list and make them "optional." Whirlwind WordSearch will automatically figure out how to make a puzzle from as many words as it can and will tell you which ones it left out.
• It automatically finds and removes any randomly-generated "naughty" words in any of your chosen languages.
• Supports Dark Mode and Full-Screen mode.
• Comprehensive built-in User Guide contains 90+ pages of tutorials and tips and describes every option, getting you up-to-speed right away. Advanced features are explained, helping you create high-quality and uniquely personalized puzzles.
Quoi de neuf dans la dernière version ?
•New Feature: Now allows turning on shape-outline or inner gridlines, was a Full-Only feature.
•New Feature: Added helpful "user tips" to the software, which will automatically pop up once a week. You can turn off the user tips from the Settings dialog, and/or step through them manually under the "Next User Tip" menu item under the Help menu. Let me know if you have suggestions for these!
•Puzzles will now try really hard to AVOID laying horizontal words along the very top or bottom row(s) of a puzzle. After the 70% mark, this rule is relaxed and words are allowed to wind up on the very top or bottom row of the puzzle. (Thanks GeorgeP)
•Added an EXTRAS tab in the Settings dialog to allow fine-tuning of the puzzle grid's width, in case you want it not quite 1:1 square. (thanks StephenK)
•Added a SEARCH field at the top of the user guide window for simple searching of words or phrases (Thanks JamesR.)
•Added a "View" menu to allow for full-screen toggling of the window.
•User Guide: Improved the section "Export" to better explain copy/paste of text into spreadsheets or into Canva.
•Added a new (short) User Guide section 4.16, describing how to use Apple Intelligence to auto-add word lists for you.
•BugFix: Copying text from Photoshop and pasting it into your word list now works without giving an error about bad (invisible) characters in your word list. Why does Photoshop sprinkle ETX characters into the text? (Thanks SandraR!)
•BugFix: Number puzzles no longer have any "naughty words" that it will check against and give strange errors about when building puzzles (Thanks JenO)
•BugFix_25012701: If you have a large number of words, all marked optional, Whirlwind will now work harder to keep as many optional words as possible to fill the puzzle, instead of just removing most of the optional words. (Thanks GeorgeP.)
•BugFix: Word lists can now also be pasted in as tab-delimited lists, and words will be separated correctly. (Thanks MarkO)
