Fall word search: leaves, orchards and sweaters

Rules

• Each autumn word in the list is hidden once in the grid, in a straight line of letters.
• The easy grid uses two directions: left to right and top to bottom.
• The hard grid uses eight: rows, columns and both diagonals, each of them forwards and backwards.
• A letter may belong to two words that cross.
• On a touch screen, tap one end of the word and then the other.

An autumn puzzle from back-to-school to first frost

The fall list starts outdoors. Under the trees there are leaves, an acorn, a chestnut, a hazelnut, a pinecone and a squirrel collecting them; the trees themselves appear as maple. On the farm there is the harvest: pumpkin, squash, gourd, apple, a cornfield, an orchard, a haystack, a hayride and a scarecrow, with cider to drink afterwards. The weather is crisp, chilly and foggy, the colours are golden, orange and amber, and the geese migrate. A rake, a bonfire, a sweater, a scarf and a flannel shirt bring it back to the garden, and september, october and november fix the dates.

Because no holiday is named, the puzzle has a long season. It is useful in the first weeks of school, when a teacher wants a calm ten minutes after lunch, and it goes naturally with a leaf-collecting walk or a lesson on why trees change colour. Afterwards, ask which of the words can be found outside the classroom window.

At home it suits a rainy weekend afternoon or a harvest festival stall. In the hard grid, look out for the pair hayride and haystack, which begin with the same three letters, and for the months, which all end in BER. Finding B E R tells you a month is there; the letters before it tell you which.

Tips

• Squirrel and squash both contain a Q, the rarest letter in this list. Find a Q and you have found one of them.
• Scarecrow and scarf share their first four letters; check the fifth.
• Golden, gourd and geese are the only words in the list that start with G.
• The grid is different every day of the season, and yesterday's is one tap on Previous away.
• Print with solution gives a marked copy for checking, on its own sheet.

How these puzzles are made and checked

A separate scan reads the finished grid from every cell in all eight directions. Every listed word must be found exactly once, at the stored position, and the grid must not spell a word from our deny list outside the listed words.

The puzzle of the day is chosen by the date on your device: puzzle 1 was the puzzle for 1 January 2026, and the number goes up by one each day. Easy: 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Hard: 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Every number stays open in the archive control above the grid. More detail is on the page how the puzzles are made and checked.