Whirlwind WordSearch
macOS / Education
Whirlwind WordSearch 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 one price... no monthly fees, no sudden updating costs. Ever.
Here's a list of features that make Whirlwind WordSearch an outstanding puzzle-generator.
* 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, 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!
* 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.
* "Basic Difficulty Mode" lets you simply move a slider from "very easy" puzzles to "very 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 again later to instantly create whole new puzzles, or share them with other Whirlwind WordSearch users.
* 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: The PRO-only feature of optionally adding Title text to exported files is now available in the regular FULL product too.
•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.
•Whirlwind now features many magic "$$Puzzle Macros" that can be used in the Title or Subtitle or Secret Message text fields. See the new User Guide section "Use Auto-Updating Puzzle Macros".
•You can now optionally draw a colored outline or "stroke" around the puzzle letters, which lets you design "hollow letters", so you can now create those popular "color in the letters" word search puzzles. See the user guide, new section 4.25, and look under the Layout/Letters tabs for the new checkbox "Draw letter outlines in color"!
•Allow a #-of-words-max value option when allowing all-words-optional, so it uses no more than that number of optional words in puzzle (Thanks GeorgeP)
•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)
•Improved behavior of Max-Optionals - Enhanced behavior of Max-Optionals: Now, if you enable All-Words-Optional and specify a Max-Optional-Words value, Whirlwind will randomly select that many words from your entire word list whenever you construct a puzzle, instead of consistently choosing the top N words from the list. Additionally, if it’s unable to fit even that many words, it will now begin removing words and rebuilding until it succeeds, rather than simply failing. I’ve attempted to explain this nuanced behavior in the user guide on page 70.
•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.
•Pro: If the Bulk-Builder gets an error when you try to load your words, it now adds a little text to remind you to read the Bulk-Builder Guide for formatting help (Thanks JenO)
•Pro: Bulk Exported files will now add the Bulk Design/Variation after the export counter in the file name.
•User Guide: Improved the section "Export" to better explain copy/paste of text into spreadsheets or into Canva.
•SVG export now correctly matches the outline thickness no matter what image pixel size you export to.
•Added a new (short) User Guide section 4.16, describing how to use Apple Intelligence to auto-add word lists for you.
•BugFix_25030301 - You can once again create rectangular puzzles under 10 characters in width. Just choose one of the Rectangle shapes first, then you can reduce the puzzle size below 10. (StephenK)
•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_25012601: Now correctly fixed: setting the Advanced-difficulty overlap to "OVERLAP ALL" will now show an error if it could not overlap all (GeorgeP & ThomasS)
•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)
(and many more features added and bugs fixed, see built-in WHATS NEW menu item for full list)
