A short history of the word search

The word search looks so obvious that it is easy to assume it has always existed. In fact it is a fairly young puzzle, more than half a century younger than the crossword, which first appeared in a New York newspaper in 1913, and nobody can say with complete certainty who made the first one. The person most often credited is an American, Norman E. Gibat, who published a word search in Oklahoma in 1968. A Spanish puzzle maker, Pedro Ocón de Oro, is credited in Spain with inventing the same kind of puzzle at around the same time. This page tells both stories, and what happened to the puzzle afterwards.

In the late 1960s Norman Gibat ran a small printing business in Norman, Oklahoma. One of the things he printed was the Selenby Digest, a free want-ad paper that was handed out at Safeway, TG&Y and other local stores. The odd name, he later explained, stood for "sell and buy", which is all the digest was about.

The issue of March 1, 1968 carried a new kind of puzzle. Gibat called it an "Oklahoma anagram": a block of letters in which the names of towns and cities of Oklahoma were hidden. The second puzzle used the streets of Norman. In a 2004 interview with The Oklahoman he described his goal simply:

"I was looking for something that would be easy for people to work while they were waiting in line at the grocery store."

Gibat's original puzzle is not reproduced here, but this small grid is in the same spirit, with five Oklahoma place names, Norman among them, hidden across, backwards, upwards and diagonally:

NORMAN fills the bottom row, ENID runs diagonally from the top, and HUGO reads backwards in the fifth row. YUKON and ALVA are still waiting: both read upwards, in the first and the last column.

The puzzle turned out to be more popular than the want ads around it. Shortly after it started, a couple of teachers in Norman asked Gibat for copies to use with their students. One of them, he recalled, sent copies to friends and relatives in other cities who were also teachers, and that was one of the ways the puzzle spread. The digest itself did not last: Gibat stopped publishing it in 1970 and never printed the puzzle again. "About 10 years later," he said, "I saw one in a newspaper. Now it's pretty common."

Gibat was convinced his was the first word search ever published. He told The Oklahoman that he had written to the Associated Press, United Press and major newspapers, and that nobody could point to anything close to his starting date. He moved back to his hometown of Fostoria, Ohio, in 1973 and died there in 2012.

In Spain and Latin America the word search is called sopa de letras, "letter soup", and Spanish sources credit its invention to Pedro Ocón de Oro, a Madrid puzzle maker who created puzzles for newspapers such as ABC for about four decades. He was extraordinarily prolific: ABC credits him with more than 600,000 puzzles of around 125 different kinds, and in 1976 he founded a puzzle magazine called Sopa de Letras. He died in 1999.

What nobody has been able to document is the date of his first sopa de letras, so it is impossible to say whether it came before or after Gibat's grid. It is quite possible that the same simple idea occurred to more than one puzzle maker at roughly the same time.

By the early 1970s word searches were finding their way into print far beyond Oklahoma. One of the best known is Wonderword, created by the Canadian writer Jo Ouellet. It first appeared in syndication in 1970, in newspapers in Edmonton and Montreal, and in 1980 Universal Press Syndicate, today Andrews McMeel, took it on. Wonderword added a twist that many puzzles still use: once all the listed words are found, the letters left over spell a hidden answer. After Jo Ouellet died in 1997, her son David, who had been helping her since 1980, carried on the feature.

The puzzle even made it to television. Now You See It, a CBS game show hosted by Jack Narz from April 1974 to June 1975, asked contestants trivia questions whose answers were hidden in a big board of letters, four rows of fourteen. CBS brought the show back briefly in 1989.

Because the puzzle grew up in many places at once, it never settled on a single name. In English it is a word search, but also a word find, word seek, word sleuth or mystery word puzzle. Other languages have their own names: sopa de letras in Spanish, mots mêlés ("mixed-up words") in French, caça-palavras ("word hunt") in Brazilian Portuguese, woordzoeker in Dutch, Suchsel in German and osmisměrka in Czech, a name built on the Czech words for "eight directions".

For its first decades the word search lived on paper: in newspapers, in puzzle magazines devoted entirely to it, and in activity books for children. Teachers kept using it, as the Norman teachers did in 1968, especially for spelling and for vocabulary in foreign language classes. Computers changed how puzzles are made rather than how they are played. A program can hide a list of words in a grid and fill the gaps in a fraction of a second, which is why today you can get a new puzzle every time you press a button.

That is what this site does. Word-Search.org has offered a free online word search since 2022, and our generator follows the same rules a careful puzzle maker would: every word placed in a straight line, words allowed to cross, and no word appearing twice. You can play it on the home page, try a daily themed puzzle, print one the old-fashioned way, or build your own grid, much as Gibat did, with the word search maker.