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 ?
•Reworked all the buttons to be opaque so they are more legible under MacOS 26.
•The "Title" tab now sports a descriptive text note at the bottom with a full list of possible puzzle macros you can use in the title string.
•Separated the vague app menu item "Reset to Defaults" into TWO new different items: "Reset Document Settings to Saved Defaults" and "Reset Document Settings to Factory Defaults", and more clearly described their differences in the user guide.
•Clarified wording of Word Clues in the user guide (section 5.13) and in the info text above the word list under "Words:Word List" tab, to remind users how to turn ON the display of word clues in the word list, which is a little obscure. (Thanks Thomas!)
•More thoroughly described how to access and disable the "User Tips" in the user guide, under section 3.6. (Thanks JamesR!)
•SVG Export now shrinks the puzzle grid as you increase the word list top margin, matching the behavior in the preview.
•SVG Export now gives a little more left and bottom margin for the Secret Message text at the bottom of the image.
•SVG internal group names and ID names are named more consistently.
•BugFix_26020501: SVG supports OPEN OVALS for answer markers, Finally! (Thanks KentM and others)
•BugFix_25120201: SVG Export now supports partial opacity in colors, if you add partial opacity to any colors, they will carry through in SVG export now!
•BugFix: The Word List "number of columns:" popup menu now correctly starts up displaying your saved setting.
•BugFix: SVG Export now more closely matches line length when setting the word list to comma-separated.
•BugFix_25012201: SVG Export now handles "open ovals" to more closely match other exports, but does not have rounded ends yet (Thanks NickA and many others!)
•BugFix_25012202: SVG Export now exports the secret message prompt below the word list if you set it to do so. (Thanks JamesR and many others!)
•BugFix: When you export with "Including title and word list" turned on, the Puzzle and Answer pages now both ALWAYS use the taller file size and layout, and thus match each other. (Thanks KentM!)
