Thanksgiving word scramble

Rules

• Every line holds one Thanksgiving word whose letters have been mixed up.
• Rearrange all the letters on the line into that word; no letter is left over and none is added.
• On screen a correct line turns green straight away, and Check points out the wrong ones.
• Each answer is a word from this site's Thanksgiving list.

A table game between the meal and the pie

Thanksgiving dinner has a natural pause when the plates are cleared and nobody is ready for dessert. A word scramble fills it without anyone having to leave their chair. Print a round for each side of the table, name one writer per side, and give them five minutes. The side with more words right chooses the first slice.

The short round is made of words such as gravy, yams, rolls, feast, pecan, cider and napkin. They are easy to guess because most of them are sitting in front of you. The long round asks for words of seven letters and more: stuffing, cranberry, leftovers, wishbone, mayflower, gratitude. Those take longer, and it helps to say the letters out loud to the person next to you.

A method that works for the food words: look for the letters that only a few dishes have. A four-letter jumble with a Y and an M is yams; a W points to wishbone or mayflower; a B and two Rs to cranberry. For the long words, find the ending first. Stuffing, blessing and carving all end in ING, and thankful and grateful end in FUL. Take those letters away and the rest is short enough to solve at a glance.

Tips for a fair game

• Everyone who opens the same number gets the same round, so two tables or two households can play against each other.
• Keep the solution page face down until time is up; it prints as a separate sheet.
• A new round appears each day in November, and Next opens another at once if the first is finished too quickly.
• Stuck on screen? Reveal one gives the next letter of the line you are working on.
• Children who find the scramble hard can do the Thanksgiving word search first; it shows the same words spelled correctly.

How these puzzles are made and checked

Each scrambled word is compared letter by letter with its answer, must differ from it, and the answer must be the only word in our own list that uses exactly those letters.

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. Short words: 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Long words: 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.