Summer word search for the long break

Rules

• The summer words under the grid are hidden among its letters, each in a straight line.
• Easy: look along the rows from left to right and down the columns.
• Hard: look along rows, columns and diagonals, in both directions.
• Words may share a letter where they cross, and each one is hidden once only.
• On a phone, tap the first letter and then the last letter of the word you have spotted.

A puzzle for the car, the tent and the last day of school

The summer list covers three places. At the beach there are waves, the ocean, a sandcastle, a seashell, a starfish, a towel, a bucket, sandals, sunscreen, sunglasses, a lifeguard, a snorkel and the sunburn you get without them, plus surfing, sailing and swimming in the sea or the pool. At the campsite there are camping, hiking, fishing, a campfire, a hammock and fireflies at dusk. In the back garden there are a picnic, a barbecue, lemonade, watermelon, sorbet, a bicycle, baseball and shorts. June, july and august, sunshine and vacation hold it together.

Summer puzzles are mostly solved away from a desk. Before a long drive or flight, open five or six numbers in a row and print each one; they are all different, and the number on the sheet lets you find the solution later without packing it.

For the last day of school, the hard grid is a fair end-of-term challenge for older children, and for camp counsellors the easy grid fills a rest hour. Four words begin with SUN and two with CAMP, so the opening letters alone do not settle which word you have found. Follow the line to its end before marking it.

Tips

• Watermelon, sunglasses and sandcastle are each ten letters long, the most a word can have here; in the hard grid they fill most of a line.
• The J of june and july and the Q of barbecue are the rarest letters in the list.
• Hammock has a double M and swimming another; both are quick to see.
• Print in large print for reading in a moving car.
• Next opens another summer grid straight away when one is not enough for the journey.

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.