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Winter Sports Word Search

A word search dedicated to winter sports, perfect for the snowy season. Hidden in the grid are seven words to find: skiing, snowboard, bobsled, curling, luge, skating and hockey. Each sport captures the thrill of speed, ice and mountain adventure. Print it for free or download it as a PDF: ideal for a winter-themed classroom activity or a snowy afternoon.

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Created for free at creapuzzle.com

Winter Sports, one by one

When winter arrives, the mountains become a giant playground, and the seven words in this grid name the sports that make the most of snow and ice. Below is a short note on each one, handy for chatting about the cold season once the grid is solved.

Skiing — The oldest and most widespread winter sport, gliding on snow with two long boards.

Snowboard — More recent and acrobatic, done standing sideways on a single board.

Bobsled — A very fast sled that races down an icy, tube-shaped track.

Curling — A precision sport: heavy granite stones are slid toward a target while teammates sweep the ice.

Luge — Raced lying face-up, steering with small movements of the body down an icy track.

Skating — Can be artistic, with jumps and spins, or a fast speed race on ice.

Hockey — A fast, spectacular team sport played with curved sticks and a puck.

Snow, ice and some surprising beginnings

Winter sports are very old. The word “ski” comes from the Old Norse skíð, a piece of split wood, and prehistoric rock carvings in Scandinavia show people gliding on skis. The oldest known ice skates, made from animal bones strapped to the feet, are about five thousand years old, while curling was first recorded in Scotland in the sixteenth century. It is still nicknamed “the roaring game” for the sound the heavy granite stones make as they glide over the ice.

The Winter Olympics began in 1924 in Chamonix, France, and Italy has hosted them three times: in Cortina d'Ampezzo in 1956, in Turin in 2006, and again in Milan and Cortina in 2026. Some sports are much younger. Snowboarding grew out of a toy called the Snurfer, invented in the United States in 1965, and it became an Olympic sport in Nagano in 1998. Luge, from a Swiss French word for a small sledge, held its first international race in Davos in 1883, while the name “bobsled” is thought to come from the way the early crews bobbed back and forth to gain speed.

Four activities for a snow-free day

Even without snow, winter sports offer plenty of ideas for games in class or at home:

  • Curling on the floor. On a smooth corridor, children slide cardboard discs towards a target marked with tape, and the team that gets closest wins. They practise aiming and judging how much force to use.
  • A paper piste. Each child draws a ski or bobsled run with bends and flags and describes it in three sentences, using the verbs slide, turn and brake.
  • The right kit. Make a poster of everything needed to ski or skate, from helmet and gloves to boots and a hat, and write next to each item what it is for.
  • Snow or ice? Ask the children to sort the seven sports into two groups. Skiing and snowboarding happen on snow; the other five take place on ice, and even bobsled and luge slide down icy tracks.

How this grid is built

Seven words hide in 12×12 squares: one horizontal and six vertical, with no diagonals at all. SNOWBOARD, with nine letters, is the longest word and LUGE, with four letters, the shortest. HOCKEY has the bottom row to itself, and the other six words run down columns 1, 2, 7, 8, 9 and 12, which leaves columns 3, 4 and 5 completely empty. No word crosses another, and since the first row is empty too, the search can start on the second.

A longer slope

For more winter words, open the generator with the Sport theme, which already includes ski and judo, and add the sports you prefer: biathlon, skeleton, freestyle, cross-country. The generator strips hyphens and spaces by itself, so cross-country is placed as a single word.

Also in Italian

The Italian names are sci (skiing), snowboard (snowboard), bob (bobsled), curling (curling), slittino (luge), pattinaggio (skating) and hockey (hockey). The Italian version, Crucipuzzle degli Sport Invernali, looks very different: it has four horizontal words, two diagonals and only one vertical, and its longest word, pattinaggio, has eleven letters.

More word searches to try

From the snow you can move on to other seasons and other subjects:

For more winter words and activities, from snowy days to cosy ones, read the article Winter word search puzzles.