Whirlwind WordSearch
macOS / Education
Whirlwind WordSearch is a word search (aka Word Find) puzzle maker that lets you create and publish 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" in any language you choose. It lets you easily export royalty-free puzzles for publishing in your books, blogs or newsletters. All of this with no monthly fees, no internet accounts, no sudden updating costs. Ever.
Whirlwind WordSearch solves your puzzle-making needs with many impressive features:
* Easily customize your puzzles, choosing different colors, fonts, and sizes for the puzzle letters and titles.
* Choose from many built-in puzzle shapes: Square, Circle, Bow-tie, Rectangle Tall/Wide, Heart, Diamond, Pinwheel, X, UL-Wedge, LL-Wedge, UR-Wedge, LR-Wedge, Square-hole, Donut, Checkers, Crescent, Plus-sign, Right-Arrow, Left-Arrow, Up-Arrow, Down-Arrow, Up-Triangle, Down-Triangle, Cross, Onion Dome, 4-Clover, Square-Peg, Round-Hole, Mushroom, Oval-Easy, Oval-Up, Trapezoid, Pentagon, Hexagon, Octagon, 4-star, 5-star, 6-star, Chevron-Up, Chevron-Down, Chevron-Left, Chevron-Right, Rainbow-up, Rainbow-down, Infinity.
* Create puzzles ranging in size from 4x4 up to 50x50 letters. The Pro upgrade increases that up to 80x80.
* Create word puzzles with words in English, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese-Hiragana, Japanese-Katakana, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit-Latin, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh.
* Create number puzzles, using Arabic numbers or Chinese/Japanese numbers.
* All puzzles are yours! Publish and make money with them… there are no copyright restrictions, royalties or "commercial use" clauses!
* Your work is safely yours. Your puzzles stay on your computer and you never need to create an account or store 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.
* Just slide the "Difficulty Mode" from "easy" puzzles to "hard" puzzles, without worrying about all the details of how it works. For more control, "Advanced Difficulty Mode" lets you control each of the fine-grained parameters yourself.
* Export high-quality puzzles and answer keys to a number of different file formats, ready for web, newsletters, worksheets, books, or other publications: PDF, PNG, JPEG, SVG, Text, IPUZ.
* Save a "snapshot" your custom layout settings so you can instantly build other puzzles with the same "look".
* Show "word clue" phrases instead of the words themselves, to make puzzles even more challenging.
* Add a "secret message" into your puzzle, which will be inserted between your words as a secondary puzzle to solve.
* Add "hidden words" into your puzzle that are not shown in the word list or answer key (for adding copyrights or extra credit words.)
* Use compound-words with spaces, dashes or apostrophes (O'Hara), or use entire phrases (May The Force Be With You).
* Extend the built-in naughty word list with your own extra words, which will be removed from any puzzles if found in the random letters.
* Add your own "permanently added hidden words", which will always be added to any word search puzzles you make.
* Any randomly-generated "naughty" words are automatically found and removed, in any chosen language.
* Supports Dark Mode and Full-Screen mode.
* Save your puzzle files, and open them later to instantly create whole new puzzles, or share them with other Whirlwind WordSearch users.
* Comprehensive built-in User Guide contains 100+ 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 ?
* Now you can optionally have your titles displayed above the answer in your exported puzzle and answer files. (Thanks Tori!)
* Now you can adjust the spacing between the puzzle and word list underneath. (Thanks Tori!)
* The ability to show/hide the word list has been enhanced. Now you can show the word list on the puzzle page, the answer page, both, or neither. The control for this has been centralized, and is no longer under the Printing tab, but at the bottom of the "Layout:Word List" tab, which seemed a more intuitive place to find it.
* You can now completely show/hide the Secret Message prompts under the puzzle/answer, if you want them to be very secret (Thanks Thomas!)
* I have re-worded the "Words:Secret Message" tab a bit, clarifying the prompt area at the bottom.
* I don't like the hollow-button look in MacOS 26/Tahoe, so I have FILLED all the buttons to be white (or black in dark mode) so they look like buttons again.
