Fall Word Search

About this puzzle

Autumn has the best vocabulary of any season. This list gathers the cozy stuff, like flannel, cider, and a crackling bonfire, along with the farm-stand favorites: gourds, cranberries, a corn maze, and a hayride. We also slipped in a few science words, including chlorophyll, equinox, and migration, because fall is when you can watch the natural world change week by week.

It works well as a September or October warm-up in elementary and middle school classrooms, and the notes give teachers a quick talking point for each word. At home, it's a good quiet activity after a day of raking or apple picking. The easy level suits younger kids, while the hard level adds diagonal and backward words for older solvers.

The 30 words in this puzzle

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

In every version (12)

Acorn

An acorn is the nut of an oak tree, holding a single seed. Squirrels, deer, jays, and many other animals rely on acorns as an important fall food.

Autumn

Autumn and fall mean the same season. Fall comes from the falling leaves, while autumn comes from the Latin word autumnus. Americans use both.

Football

Fall is football season, from Friday night high school games to college Saturdays and backyard games of catch in a pile of leaves.

Harvest

Harvest is the gathering of ripe crops. In much of North America, fall is the main harvest season for corn, apples, pumpkins, and soybeans.

Hayride

A ride in a wagon or trailer loaded with hay or straw, usually pulled by a tractor. Hayrides are a staple of pumpkin patches and fall festivals.

Maple

Maple trees are famous for brilliant red and orange fall color. The maple leaf is also the national symbol on Canada's flag.

Pinecone

Pinecones hold a pine tree's seeds. Many cones close up in damp weather and open in dry weather, so the seeds can blow away on a breezy day.

Pumpkin

Pumpkins are a type of winter squash. Botanically they are fruits, because they grow from a flower and carry seeds inside.

Rake

A long-handled tool with tines for gathering fallen leaves. Leaving some leaves on garden beds can shelter insects and enrich the soil.

Scarecrow

A figure dressed in old clothes and set up in a field to frighten birds away from crops. Today scarecrows are also a favorite fall decoration.

Squirrel

Many squirrels spend fall burying nuts to eat over winter. Gray squirrels forget some of their stashes, which helps plant new trees.

Sweater

A knitted top worn for warmth. The name comes from the fact that early versions were worn by athletes to make them sweat and lose weight.

Added in Medium and Hard (8)

Apple Orchard

An orchard is a planned planting of fruit trees. Most apple varieties in the Northern Hemisphere ripen between late August and October, making fall the time to go picking.

Bonfire

A large outdoor fire. The word comes from 'bone fire,' from medieval fires in which bones were burned.

Caramel Apple

A crisp apple on a stick, dipped in warm, gooey caramel. Caramel apples are a favorite treat at fall festivals, farm stands, and Halloween parties.

Cider

In the United States, apple cider usually means fresh, unfiltered apple juice pressed in the fall. Orchards and fall festivals often serve it warm with a cinnamon stick.

Corn Maze

A maze cut through a field of tall corn. Farms often plant mazes in elaborate shapes that can only be fully seen from the air.

Cranberry

Cranberries grow on low vines in sandy bogs. Many farms flood the bogs at harvest so the floating berries can be gathered from the surface.

Flannel

Flannel is a soft woven fabric, traditionally wool and now often cotton, brushed to raise a fuzzy surface. Plaid flannel shirts are a fall wardrobe classic.

Frost

Frost forms on cold, clear nights when water vapor turns straight into ice crystals. The first frost of fall ends the growing season for tender plants like tomatoes.

Added in Hard (10)

Chestnut

Chestnuts are nuts that are often roasted in fall and winter. American chestnut trees were nearly wiped out by a disease called chestnut blight in the early 1900s.

Chlorophyll

The green pigment plants use to capture sunlight. As days shorten, trees stop making it, and the green fades to reveal yellow and orange pigments.

Cornucopia

The horn of plenty, a horn-shaped basket overflowing with fruits and vegetables. It has been a symbol of a good harvest since the days of ancient Greece.

Deciduous

Deciduous trees, like maples and oaks, drop their leaves every fall. Losing leaves helps them save water and survive the cold winter months.

Equinox

The autumnal equinox, around September 22 or 23 in the Northern Hemisphere, is when day and night are roughly equal in length all over the world.

Foliage

Another word for leaves. Fall colors appear when green chlorophyll breaks down, revealing yellow and orange pigments, while some trees make new red pigments in autumn.

Gourd

Gourds are hard-shelled fruits in the same plant family as pumpkins and squash. Dried gourds have been made into bowls, rattles, and birdhouses for thousands of years.

Hibernate

Animals such as groundhogs and some bats eat extra food in fall to store fat, then hibernate through winter, when their heartbeat and body temperature drop way down.

Leaf Peeping

A nickname for traveling to see fall foliage. New England, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the Upper Midwest draw big crowds of leaf peepers each October.

Migration

The seasonal journey of animals to new areas. Many birds and monarch butterflies fly south in fall to find warmer weather and food.

A few facts to share while you solve

• The yellow and orange in fall leaves are present all summer long, hidden by green chlorophyll. Many of the reds are made fresh in autumn, when leaves produce pigments called anthocyanins.
• Americans mostly say fall, from the older phrase 'fall of the leaf,' while British English mostly uses autumn. Both words were in use in England by the 1500s.
• Pumpkins, acorns, and cranberries are all fruits in the botanical sense, because each one develops from a flower and contains seeds.

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 fall word search: all 30 words on a 17 × 17 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 fall word search: the 12 most familiar words on a 11 × 11 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.