Winter word search: snow, ice and warm clothes

Rules

• Find each winter word from the list in the grid of letters. Words lie in straight lines.
• In the easy grid a word runs across to the right or straight down.
• In the hard grid a word may run in any of eight directions, including backwards and diagonally.
• Letters can be shared between crossing words, and a listed word is hidden only once.
• Tap the two ends of a word to mark it on screen.

A cold-weather puzzle for January and snow days

The winter list was written to be free of any celebration. It has the weather (frost, blizzard, flurry, freezing, icicle, glacier), the clothes you put on against it (mittens, gloves, scarf, boots, jacket, sweater, earmuffs) and what people do outdoors: skating, skiing, sledding, hockey, a ride on a toboggan, a walk in snowshoes. Indoors there is cocoa, a blanket, firewood and the fireplace. A penguin and an igloo stand for the coldest places, and january and february for the calendar.

That makes it the puzzle for the weeks when the holiday sheets are out of date. In a school it suits a class where families keep different holidays, or none, and it sits well beside a science lesson on weather, water freezing or animals that hibernate. Ask pupils to sort the words they found into three columns afterwards: weather, clothing and activities.

At home it is a snow-day activity. Several words in the list begin with SNOW, such as snowflake, snowman, snowball and snowshoes, so in the hard grid finding the letters S N O W is only half the job; follow the line on to see which of them you have. The list has no plain snow in it for exactly that reason: it would be hidden inside the longer words.

Tips

• Hunt for the Z of blizzard, frozen and freezing and the K of skating, skiing, hockey and jacket; both letters are scarce in the grid.
• Toboggan has a double G and mittens a double T, which are easier to see than single letters.
• When you find SNOW, check all the listed snow words before marking; only one of them continues correctly.
• The grid changes daily through the winter and each one keeps its number, so a week of morning puzzles never repeats.
• Print with solution if you plan to let children mark each other's sheets.

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.