Word search puzzles are common teaching tools for vocabulary words. Words are hidden in a rectangle of letters horizontally, vertically, and diagonally, both forwards and backwards, and may overlap.
The solver in this directory takes a list of words in a newline-delimited file and rectangle dimensions and generates all word search puzzles containing all words in the file. Underscores in the resulting puzzle can be replaced by any letter.
The file numbers.txt in this directory has the numbers ONE through TWELVE. Running create-wordsearch.sh numbers.txt 6 6 generates puzzles like:
EERHTN
VLEUWE
LXENOT
EIEVIF
WSEVEN
THGIEN
The file names.txt in this directory has the last names of some famous mathematicians. create-wordsearch.sh names.txt 13 13 generates puzzles like:
WEIERSTRASSKM
FROBENIUSTYII
HADAMARDGILRN
BERTRANDLEVCK
CATALANMALEHO
HERMITEAITSHW
UICANTORSJTOS
RNL__L_KHEEFK
WEABELNOESRFI
ISGSEOEFRGN__
TNNNPRTFBOREL
ZE_PU_TUADNAL
HJPERRONILLEM