About this puzzle
The names here span more than 2,000 years of discovery, from Archimedes in ancient Greece and Copernicus and Galileo rethinking the sky to Katherine Johnson calculating flight paths for NASA. You will find physicists like Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, biologists like Darwin, Mendel, and Goodall, medical pioneers like Pasteur, Fleming, and Salk, inventors like Edison and Tesla, and computing pioneers Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and Alan Turing. Last names only, the way they usually appear in textbooks.
Each note names the scientist and gives the one discovery or idea they are best known for, so students finish the puzzle knowing why the name matters. It suits a science class, a Women's History Month lesson, or a research project where each student picks a name, and grown-ups who like science history will enjoy it too.
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)
- Carver
- George Washington Carver was an agricultural scientist at the Tuskegee Institute. He taught farmers to rotate crops like peanuts and sweet potatoes to restore worn-out soil, and found hundreds of uses for those crops.
- Curie
- Marie Curie studied radioactivity and discovered the elements polonium and radium. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
- Darwin
- Charles Darwin sailed around the world on HMS Beagle and studied animals on the Galapagos Islands. His 1859 book On the Origin of Species explained evolution by natural selection.
- Edison
- Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 and developed a practical, long-lasting light bulb in 1879. He received more than 1,000 US patents for his inventions.
- Einstein
- Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity, which changed how scientists think about space, time, and gravity. He won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the photoelectric effect.
- Franklin
- Rosalind Franklin made X-ray images of DNA, including the famous Photo 51, that helped reveal its double helix shape. Benjamin Franklin, another famous scientist, studied electricity and invented the lightning rod.
- Galileo
- Galileo Galilei improved the telescope and, in 1610, discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter. His observations supported the idea that Earth travels around the Sun.
- Goodall
- Jane Goodall began studying wild chimpanzees in Tanzania in 1960. She discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools, which scientists had believed only humans did.
- Hawking
- Stephen Hawking was a physicist who studied black holes and the origin of the universe. He explained these big ideas for everyday readers in his best-selling book A Brief History of Time.
- Newton
- Isaac Newton described the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation in a book published in 1687. He also showed that white light is made of a rainbow of colors.
- Pasteur
- Louis Pasteur showed that germs cause many diseases. He invented pasteurization, which uses heat to kill harmful germs in milk and other foods, and created a rabies vaccine in 1885.
- Tesla
- Nikola Tesla was an inventor and engineer whose alternating current motor and power system helped bring electricity to homes. A unit for measuring magnetic fields, the tesla, is named after him.
Added in Medium and Hard (8)
- Archimedes
- Archimedes was a Greek mathematician and inventor from Syracuse, Sicily, in the 200s BC. He explained why things float, and legend says he shouted Eureka when the idea struck him in the bath.
- Copernicus
- Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer who argued that Earth and the other planets travel around the Sun. His book explaining the idea was published in 1543.
- Fleming
- Alexander Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mold growing in one of his dishes was killing bacteria. That mold gave the world penicillin, the first widely used antibiotic medicine.
- Hubble
- Edwin Hubble showed in the 1920s that there are other galaxies far beyond our Milky Way and that the universe is expanding. The Hubble Space Telescope is named after him.
- Johnson
- Katherine Johnson was a NASA mathematician who calculated flight paths for early American spaceflights, including John Glenn's orbit of Earth in 1962. Her story is told in the book and film Hidden Figures.
- Lovelace
- Ada Lovelace wrote notes in 1843 about Charles Babbage's planned Analytical Engine, including steps for it to calculate numbers. She is often called the first computer programmer.
- Mendel
- Gregor Mendel was a monk who bred thousands of pea plants to learn how traits like color and height pass from parents to offspring. He is called the father of genetics.
- Ride
- Sally Ride was a physicist who became the first American woman in space in 1983, flying aboard the space shuttle Challenger. She later started a company to get kids excited about science.
Added in Hard (10)
- Bohr
- Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who described atoms with electrons traveling in set energy levels around the nucleus. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.
- Carson
- Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and writer. Her 1962 book Silent Spring showed how pesticides harmed birds and other wildlife and helped start the modern environmental movement.
- Faraday
- Michael Faraday discovered in 1831 that moving a magnet near a wire can make electricity flow. That idea, called electromagnetic induction, is how power plants generate electricity.
- Hopper
- Grace Hopper was a computer scientist and US Navy rear admiral who helped create programming languages that use words instead of numbers. Her team once found a real moth stuck inside a computer.
- Jemison
- Mae Jemison is a doctor and engineer who became the first African American woman in space in 1992, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour. She also served in the Peace Corps in West Africa.
- Kepler
- Johannes Kepler discovered that planets travel around the Sun in ovals called ellipses, not perfect circles. NASA named its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope after him.
- Linnaeus
- Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist who created the two-part naming system scientists still use for living things, like Homo sapiens for humans, in the 1700s.
- Sagan
- Carl Sagan was an astronomer who made space science popular with his 1980 TV series Cosmos. He also helped create the Golden Records carried by the two Voyager spacecraft.
- Salk
- Jonas Salk developed the first successful vaccine against polio, a disease that paralyzed thousands of children each year. It was announced as safe and effective in 1955, and Salk chose not to patent it.
- Turing
- Alan Turing was a British mathematician whose 1936 idea of a universal computing machine helped lay the foundations of computer science. During World War II he helped crack secret coded messages.
A few facts to share while you solve
- Three chemical elements are named after scientists in this puzzle: curium honors Marie and Pierre Curie, einsteinium honors Albert Einstein, and copernicium honors Nicolaus Copernicus.
- Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive more than a century later, so they are stored in lead-lined boxes at the national library of France.
- Isaac Newton told a friend late in life that seeing an apple fall from a tree helped get him thinking about gravity. There is no evidence the apple hit him on the head.
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.
| Version | Words | Grid | Directions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 12 | 11 × 11 | The 12 most familiar words, reading forward across and down. |
| Medium | 20 | 15 × 15 | Twenty words across, down and diagonally. No backwards words. |
| Hard | 30 | 16 × 16 | Every word, in all eight directions including backwards, with look-alike filler letters. |
| Large print | 12 | 11 × 11 | The 12 most familiar words on a small grid with big letters. No backwards words. |
Hard and large print versions
Hard scientists word search: all 30 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 scientists 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
- Find a word from the list in the grid. Scanning for its first letter is the quickest way.
- Drag across the word from its first letter to its last. On a phone, you can also tap the first letter, then the last.
- 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.
Questions and answers
Which scientists are included in this word search?
Easy and Large print use 12 well-known names: Curie, Einstein, Newton, Darwin, Galileo, Edison, Franklin, Tesla, Goodall, Carver, Pasteur, and Hawking. Medium adds eight more, such as Archimedes, Lovelace, and Ride, and Hard includes all 30, up to Turing, Bohr, and Jemison. The list mixes physicists, biologists, chemists, inventors, and mathematicians so students see how many different kinds of science there are.
Why does Franklin stand for Rosalind Franklin?
Rosalind Franklin's work on DNA is a key part of the story of modern biology, and she is often left out of it. Benjamin Franklin, the founding father who experimented with electricity, shares the surname, so the note mentions both. Students can discuss what each Franklin discovered.
How can I use this puzzle for a science lesson?
After solving, have each student choose one scientist from the list and find two more facts for a short report or poster. Students can also sort the names by field, such as space, life science, electricity, and computing, or place them on a timeline.
Is there an answer key for this scientists word search?
Yes. Choose Print / PDF above the puzzle and keep “Add an answer key page” ticked. The key prints on its own page, with every word highlighted. While playing online, Show answers outlines any words you haven’t found yet.
Can I print copies for my class or group?
Yes. Every puzzle on BetterWordSearch is free to print for personal, classroom, library and homeschool use. Print as many copies as you need. To change the words or make several different versions of the grid, use the word search maker.
What changes between Easy, Medium, Hard and Large print?
Easy hides the 12 most familiar words, reading left to right and top to bottom. Medium uses 20 words and adds diagonals. Hard hides all 30 words in every direction, including backwards, with look-alike filler letters. Large print uses the same words as Easy on a small grid and prints with big letters.
