Colors word search

A rainbow of a puzzle: the basic colors every child learns first (red, blue, green, yellow) sit next to finer shades like turquoise, magenta, burgundy, maroon and charcoal. A few words are about color itself, such as shade, tint, hue, pastel and neon.

Many color names started out as names of things. Orange was a fruit before it was a color, and so were lime, peach, plum and olive. Emerald, ruby and jade are gemstones, amber is fossilized tree resin, salmon and coral come from the sea, and magenta was named after a battle fought near the town of Magenta in Italy in 1859. The colors of the rainbow, in order, are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, which many people remember as ROY G. BIV.

For young children, this is the classic first theme: the words are short, familiar and easy to say aloud. Ask them to name something of each color they find, or to find the word and then point to that color in the room.

Play tip: on the expert level the list shows only how many letters each word has, and the full word list on this page becomes a useful cheat sheet. A four-letter blank could be BLUE, PINK, GOLD, NAVY, TEAL, JADE, LIME or MINT, so check which of those first letters you can see in the grid.