December
The words a UK or a US classroom will not recognise, and why that is not a spelling problem
The list below is built to work in all four, which mostly means keeping it concrete. Almost every word here is a thing you could point at.
Seasonal word lists are usually localised by spelling, and Christmas is the case where that misses the point entirely. The vocabulary gap between British and American Christmas is not COLOUR against COLOR. It is that several of the most Christmassy words in each country mean nothing at all in the other.
A CRACKER in Britain is a cardboard tube pulled at the table that bangs and produces a paper hat and a bad joke. In the United States it is a biscuit. PANTOMIME is a December institution in the UK and unknown in the US. Going the other way, a CANDY CANE and the whole idea of a MAILBOX for letters to Santa are American staples that a British seven-year-old may never have seen.
This list deliberately holds the words that travel, and the ones below that do not are marked. If you are printing for a class with children from both, the marked words are worth explaining before the sheet goes out rather than after, because a word search gives no clue about meaning: a child will find PANTOMIME perfectly and still have no idea what it is.
Words that travel — 49 words
Recognised in both British and American classrooms. The words left out are the ones worth explaining first.
- Angel
- Bells
- Candle
- Carol
- Celebrate
- Chimney
- Christmas
- Cocoa
- December
- Decorate
- Evergreen
- Family
- Feast
- Festive
- Fireplace
- Frosty
- Garland
- Gingerbread
- Glitter
- Holiday
- Holly
- Icicle
- Jingle
- Jolly
- Joyful
- Lantern
- Manger
- Merry
- Mistletoe
- Mittens
- Nativity
- Ornament
- Present
- Reindeer
- Ribbon
- Rudolph
- Santa
- Scarf
- Season
- Sleigh
- Snowflake
- Sparkle
- Stocking
- Tinsel
- Toys
- Tradition
- Turkey
- Winter
- Wreath
The other 12, and why they are separate
These are on the full list rather than the default one. They are not harder to find; they are a different decision about the room you are printing for.
- Bauble
- Blizzard
- Chestnut
- Cracker
- Cranberry
- Fairy
- Grotto
- Noel
- Pantomime
- Parcel
- Pudding
- Yuletide
Both lists are checked when this site is built: every word is four to twelve letters, no word contains another word on the same list, and the subset is a genuine subset. A word inside another word has no honest answer key, so that check fails the build rather than being repaired quietly at print time.
Four ways to use this sheet that are not "hand it out"
Picking the settings for the room you are in
- Easy hides words across and down only and never reverses one, which makes finding them letter matching rather than reading. It is the setting that decides whether a young child can do the sheet at all.
- Grid size is not difficulty. A bigger grid is a longer hunt through more filler: the share of squares that are part of an answer falls from 57 per cent at 10x10 to 37 per cent at 20x20.
- Expert fills the empty squares with letters taken from the word list itself, so hunting for an unusual letter stops working. It is the only setting that resists that shortcut.
- Large print with a smaller grid beats normal print with a bigger one for anyone working with a magnifier, and the two settings are independent.
What this page does not do
There are no pictures. Every puzzle on this site is generated from rules rather than drawn, which is what lets the builder make unlimited sheets with checked answers, and the cost is that a seasonal page here is words on a grid rather than a decorated border.
The list is also fixed rather than editable in place. If you want your own christmas vocabulary, the custom list option takes a pasted list and tells you which words it had to drop and why.
How this page is made and checked
Print Puzzles is part of the Hamilton Digital Media Limited puzzle network, and this page is written and reviewed by Brian Hamilton and Karan Hamilton. The word lists here were compiled and checked by hand, and the grid engine is the same one behind Printable Word Search: it confirms that every listed word appears exactly once in the finished grid, drops any word that contains another word on the list, and counts a palindrome once rather than twice. Read more about how we make puzzle packs, or tell us about a sheet that misbehaves through the contact page.
Nothing here costs anything and there is no account. Grids are built in your own browser, so a pasted word list never leaves your machine. The terms of use let teachers, parents, clubs, libraries and care homes print and copy these sheets and their answer keys freely.