Halloween Word Search — Free Online
Play free Halloween word search puzzles online — every Halloween theme we have is listed below. Each theme has four difficulty levels; Quick and Easy suit kids, Medium and Hard suit adults.
Halloween word search themes
Browse themes · Christmas · Thanksgiving
Where Halloween comes from
Halloween grew out of Samhain, the Celtic festival that marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter on 31 October, a night when the line between the living and the dead was thought to wear thin. The Church later set All Saints' Day on 1 November, and the evening before became All Hallows' Eve. Families in Ireland and Scotland carved turnips into lanterns long before anyone used a pumpkin. That swap happened in America, where pumpkins were cheap and far easier to carve.
What's in the word lists
Our main Halloween pack has 20 puzzles and goes well past ghosts and bats. The obvious ones are there, like PUMPKIN, SKELETON, VAMPIRE and ZOMBIE, but so are older, stranger words: COVEN, CRYPT, SCYTHE, HOBGOBLIN, DRUIDS and HECATE, the Greek goddess of witchcraft. A lot of the list is mood words such as EERIE, DISMAL, SPECTRAL and PETRIFY, so it doubles as a vocabulary exercise.
October fun
Teachers tend to reach for the Quick and Easy levels in the last week of October, when nobody can concentrate on much else anyway. At a party, put a Medium board on a laptop and see who finds the last word first. If you'd rather work on paper, every puzzle has a print button.