giganticFind to reveal
Gigantic comes from the Giants of Greek myth, the Gigantes, who battled the gods and were said to lie buried beneath volcanoes.
Opposites Word Search
Find familiar words. Discover something unexpected.
Puzzle10 words · 11×11 grid · Medium · Answer key included
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🎉 Solved — all 10 words found!
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Find a puzzle word to reveal its fact.
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delicateFind to reveal
Delicate once emphasized delight and pleasure, before its meaning shifted toward things easily damaged, like fine fabric or fragile glass.
generousFind to reveal
Generous once meant of noble birth; only later did it come to mean giving freely, sharing a root with genus and gene.
cheerfulFind to reveal
Cheer once meant the face or expression, so a cheerful person literally showed a bright and welcoming face.
ancientFind to reveal
Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the Great Pyramid's construction, stretching the timeline hidden inside ancient Egypt.
distantFind to reveal
France's longest land border is with Brazil, because French Guiana is part of France, bringing the country's frontier into distant South America.
shallowFind to reveal
Florida's Lake Okeechobee covers hundreds of square miles, yet averages only nine feet deep, making a huge lake unexpectedly shallow.
crookedFind to reveal
Pisa's tower survived earthquakes partly because the soft soil that caused its lean also reduced how strongly the structure shook.
happyFind to reveal
Happy comes from the old word hap, meaning luck or chance, the same root inside happen, perhaps, and mishap.
angryFind to reveal
Angry began as a feeling of being tight or pinched: its root meant narrow, the same idea behind anguish and anxious.
True stories · Warsaw, Poland
A prefix that doubles the vocabulary
In Warsaw, Poland, an eye doctor named Ludwik Zamenhof published a small grammar in 1887 for a language he hoped the whole world could share. To make it easy, he gave it a clever trick for opposites: add the prefix mal- and the meaning flips. Bona means good, so malbona means bad. Lumo means light, so mallumo means darkness. A learner who memorized one word secretly knew two. The language, Esperanto, is still spoken by people on every continent today, taught at clubs and online. A small piece of word-building makes a big difference to a beginner's vocabulary.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
Trivia
A word that can have opposite meanings, like cleave (split apart or cling to), has a special name. What is it?
A contronym (also called a Janus word or auto-antonym).
Esperanto builds most antonyms with one prefix added to a root, so bona (good) becomes its opposite. Which prefix?
mal- (giving malbona, bad).
English adds -er and -est to short adjectives, but good and bad use unrelated words for their comparatives. What is this called?
Suppletion (good, better, best; bad, worse, worst).
Many opposite pairs join with the prefix un- or in-, as in happy and unhappy. What do we call such a word-building prefix?
A negative or privative prefix.
Before nice took on its modern sense of pleasant, its Latin ancestor nescius meant what?
Ignorant or unaware.
Trivia · 1 / 5
A word that can have opposite meanings, like cleave (split apart or cling to), has a special name. What is it?
A contronym (also called a Janus word or auto-antonym).
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Play →or printTrue stories · Oxford, England
The dictionary that asked for help
In Oxford, England, the editors of a vast new dictionary faced an impossible task: tracking how English words and their changing meanings, was actually used. So in 1879 they did something bold. They printed an appeal asking ordinary readers everywhere to mail in slips of paper quoting words from the books they read. Millions of slips arrived over the years. One of the most devoted helpers, William Minor, sent thousands from his room, building a record of how words shift, narrow, and even reverse over time. The Oxford English Dictionary was, in part, written by its own readers.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Find happy, angry and gigantic among the words hidden in this puzzle. Play free online or print the puzzle with its answer key.
Is this opposites word search free to print?
This opposites word search is a free printable puzzle with 10 hidden words in an 11×11 grid. Find words like GIGANTIC, DELICATE, GENEROUS hidden across, down, and diagonally. You can play it right here in your browser — tap the first and last letter of a word — or download it as a printable PDF with the full answer key on page two. It's free for personal and classroom use, so teachers can print copies for a whole class with no sign-up and no account. Word searches like this one are a proven way to build vocabulary, spelling, and word-shape recognition, which is why they're a favourite with ESL learners, elementary classrooms, and anyone who likes a quiet puzzle with their coffee.
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Sources: Unua Libro (Esperanto, 1887) and the mal- prefix · The history of the OED Appeals (1879) · Etymology of nice (from Latin nescius) · Etymology of dirt and bird (metathesis)
Word list, facts & trivia researched and compiled by Sam Letterman — spotted a mistake? Tell us and we’ll fix it.