Vegetables Word Search

A word search dedicated to vegetables, perfect for encouraging healthy eating habits. Hidden in the grid are eight words to find: carrot, tomato, zucchini, eggplant, spinach, broccoli, onion and pepper. Getting to know these words playfully can make vegetables feel far more approachable to children. Print it for free or download it as a PDF: ideal for a science lesson connected to plants and nutrition.

CARROT
TOMATO
ZUCCHINI
EGGPLANT
SPINACH
BROCCOLI
ONION
PEPPER

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Created for free at creapuzzle.com

Vegetables, one by one

Children are more willing to eat vegetables once they have learned to recognise and name them. The eight words in this grid are common vegetables, and below is a short note on each one, from colour to cooking.

Carrot — Rich in a substance that's great for eyesight, and originally it wasn't orange at all — it was purple or white.

Tomato — Technically a fruit, though used as a vegetable in the kitchen; it arrived in Europe only a few centuries ago.

Zucchini — Tender and delicate, and even its flower can be eaten.

Eggplant — Purple and glossy, always cooked before eating, and the star of many baked dishes.

Spinach — Rich in iron and famous for giving energy, as shown in a classic cartoon.

Broccoli — Shaped like a little tree and part of the cabbage family; excellent for health.

Onion — Grows underground in layers and makes eyes water when cut, due to a released chemical.

Pepper — Colourful — red, yellow or green — and contains more vitamin C than an orange.

Names, journeys and surprises

Vegetable names change from country to country. This grid uses the American words zucchini and eggplant, which British English calls courgette and aubergine. Zucchini comes straight from Italian, where zucchina means a little squash. The word “pepper” has a story of its own: when Columbus reached the Americas looking for black pepper, he gave the name to the spicy pods he found there, although the plants are not related, and the name stuck for sweet peppers too.

Many of these vegetables travelled a long way. Tomatoes, peppers and zucchini come from the Americas and reached Europe only after 1492, and tomatoes were grown for years as ornamental plants because some people feared they were poisonous. In 1893 the United States Supreme Court even ruled that tomatoes count as vegetables for the purpose of import duties, whatever botanists say. Spinach comes from Persia and eggplant from India, and the orange carrot we know today was developed in the Netherlands in the 1600s.

Four activities from the garden to the classroom

Vegetables become familiar when children can touch them, watch them and talk about them:

A garden on the windowsill. Put the top of a carrot or the base of an onion in a saucer of water and watch it for a week: leaves and roots appear. The children draw and note what changes each day.
Root, leaf or fruit? Draw three columns and ask the children to sort the vegetables by the part we eat: carrot and onion grow underground, spinach and broccoli are leaves and flowers, and tomato, pepper, zucchini and eggplant are fruits in the botanical sense.
A plate of colours. Ask the children to draw a plate with at least four different colours using the vegetables in the grid: orange, red, green and purple. It is a simple way to remember that a varied plate means varied vitamins.
The brave taste. At home, or in class with the parents' permission, taste a small piece of a raw or cooked vegetable and describe it with one adjective: crunchy, sweet, bitter, soft. Those who do not know the vegetable can at least say what it looks like.

How this grid is built

The grid is 12×12 squares and holds eight vegetables: four horizontal, one vertical and three diagonal. ZUCCHINI, SPINACH and BROCCOLI form three parallel diagonals sloping down to the right, like furrows in a field, and ONION, EGGPLANT and PEPPER sit in the last three rows, one under the other. ZUCCHINI, EGGPLANT and BROCCOLI, with eight letters each, are the longest; ONION, with five letters, is the shortest. No two words cross, and the second row is empty.

A bigger garden

To grow a bigger garden, open the generator with the Food theme and add other vegetables: cauliflower, fennel, celery, lettuce, cucumber. For long words like cauliflower, a 13×13 grid is more comfortable, and the Hard level adds diagonal words like the ones in this puzzle.

Also in Italian

The Italian names are carota (carrot), pomodoro (tomato), zucchina (zucchini), melanzana (eggplant), spinaci (spinach), broccolo (broccoli), cipolla (onion) and peperone (pepper). The Italian version of this puzzle, Crucipuzzle della Verdura, has a very different layout: six of its eight words are vertical, like rows in a vegetable patch.