Colors Word Search

About this puzzle

This puzzle starts with the color names most children learn first, like Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow, and adds a handful of fancier shades to stretch their vocabulary: Turquoise, Magenta, Indigo, and Violet. Short words keep it friendly for early readers, while the longer names give confident spellers something to hunt for.

Below the grid, each color has a quick fact, such as why the sky looks blue or where the word orange came from. Kids can color each word with a matching crayon as they find it, which turns the page into an art activity too. It works well for preschool and kindergarten centers, rainy afternoons, and early spelling practice.

The 23 words in this puzzle

Every word, with a short note. Handy for teaching the vocabulary before or after solving.

In every version (12)

Black

Black things soak up almost all the light that hits them. That is why a black shirt feels warmer on a sunny day than a white one.

Blue

Blue is a primary color in painting. The sky looks blue because air scatters blue sunlight in every direction more than other colors.

Brown

You can make brown by mixing all three primary paint colors together. Tree bark, chocolate, and many animal coats are brown.

Gold

Gold is a shiny, deep yellow named after the precious metal. First-place winners at the Olympics receive gold medals.

Gray

Gray is made by mixing black and white. In Britain and some other countries, it is usually spelled grey, but it is the same color.

Green

Mixing blue and yellow paint makes green. Most plants look green because of chlorophyll, which helps them use sunlight to make food.

Orange

You can mix orange from red and yellow paint. The fruit was named first, and English speakers later borrowed its name for the color.

Pink

Pink is a light red made by adding white. Flamingos turn pink from natural coloring in the shrimp and algae they eat.

Purple

Purple comes from mixing red and blue. Long ago, purple dye was made from sea snails and cost so much that mostly royalty wore it.

Red

Red is one of the three primary colors in painting. Of all the colors in a rainbow, red light has the longest waves.

White

White light, like sunlight, is really all the rainbow colors mixed together. A prism can split it apart so you can see each color.

Yellow

Yellow is a primary color in painting. School buses are painted yellow because it is one of the easiest colors to spot from far away.

Added in Medium and Hard (8)

Indigo

Indigo is a deep blue named after the indigo plant, which has been used for thousands of years to dye cloth. Blue jeans were traditionally dyed with it.

Maroon

Maroon is a dark brownish red. Its name comes from marron, the French word for chestnut.

Navy

Navy is a very dark blue. It is named after the dark blue uniforms worn by officers in Britain's Royal Navy starting in the 1700s.

Peach

Peach is a soft, pale orange-pink named after the fuzzy fruit. People in China have been growing peaches for thousands of years.

Silver

Silver is a shiny gray color named after the precious metal. Second-place winners at the Olympics receive silver medals.

Tan

Tan is a light, sandy brown, like the color of cardboard or a paper bag. Many deer and camels have tan fur.

Teal

Teal is a dark blue-green. It is named after the teal, a small duck that has a patch of this color on its head or wings.

Violet

Violet is the last color in the rainbow and has the shortest waves of light our eyes can see. It is also the name of a small purple flower.

Added in Hard (3)

Cyan

Cyan is a bright greenish blue. It is one of the four ink colors in most color printers, and its name comes from a Greek word for dark blue.

Magenta

Magenta is a bright purplish pink. It is one of the ink colors inside most color printers, along with cyan, yellow, and black.

Turquoise

This blue-green color is named after a gemstone. The name means Turkish, because the stone reached Europe through trade routes across Turkey.

A few facts to share while you solve

• The colors of the rainbow always appear in the same order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Some people remember it with the name Roy G. Biv.
• TV and phone screens make every color they show by mixing just three colors of light: red, green, and blue.
• Dogs can see colors, but mostly blues and yellows. Reds and greens look much duller to them than they do to people.

Four versions of this puzzle

Pick a version with the buttons above the grid. Each one has its own grid and answer key, and your progress on each is saved separately in this browser.

Hard and large print versions

Hard colors word search: all 23 words on a 16 × 16 grid, hidden forward, backward, up, down and along both diagonals, with filler letters borrowed from the word list. Print it without the word list for an extra challenge. Play the hard version, or see all hard word searches.

Large print colors word search: the 12 most familiar words on a 10 × 10 grid, printed with big letters and a big word list, and no backwards words. Play the large print version, or see all large print word searches.

Printing this word search

Press Print / PDF above the puzzle. You get a clean one-page sheet with the title, the grid, a word list with tick boxes, and optional name and date lines. The answer key prints on a second page. Prefer a file? Download it as a PDF or an image to print later or drop into a worksheet. Whatever version is showing on screen is the one that prints, and the large print version prints with bigger letters.

How to play online

1. Find a word from the list in the grid. Scanning for its first letter is the quickest way.
2. Drag across the word from its first letter to its last. On a phone, you can also tap the first letter, then the last.
3. Found words get highlighted and crossed off. Stuck? Hint circles the first letter of a word you haven’t found.

Read the full guide to solving word searches, with tips that make big grids much faster.