Weather Word Search: 56 Words From Drizzle to Hurricane
This weather word search draws from 56 words: the four cloud families, every kind of rain and ice, the biggest storms on Earth, and the tools a forecaster uses to see them coming. Each New Puzzle is a fresh grid. It opens on Easy, where words run only across and down, and Hard turns them in every direction. You can also print a pack for a science unit, with the answers at the back.
🌦️ All 56 Weather Words
A puzzle uses 8, 12 or 18 of these at a time. Reading the list aloud first helps younger solvers know what they are hunting for.
- Sun, wind and air: Sunny, Sunshine, Cloudy, Overcast, Breeze, Wind, Windy, Gust, Humid, Chilly
- Cloud families: Cumulus, Cirrus, Stratus, Nimbus
- Water from the sky: Rain, Rainfall, Drizzle, Downpour, Puddle, Flood, Drought, Rainbow, Mist, Fog, Dew, Monsoon
- Ice and snow: Snow, Snowflake, Sleet, Hail, Hailstone, Ice, Frost
- Big weather: Storm, Thunder, Lightning, Tornado, Hurricane, Typhoon, Cyclone, Blizzard, Heat Wave
- Measuring it: Temperature, Thermometer, Degrees, Celsius, Fahrenheit, Barometer, Radar, Weather Vane, Forecast, Meteorologist, Climate, Season
- Staying dry: Umbrella, Raincoat
☁️ Four Cloud Names, Four Latin Words
The cloud names in the grid come from Luke Howard, an English chemist who sorted clouds into families in 1802 and gave them Latin names. Each one describes what the cloud looks like:
- Cumulus means "heap": the puffy, cotton-ball clouds of a fair afternoon.
- Cirrus means "curl of hair": thin, wispy streaks high in the sky, made of ice crystals.
- Stratus means "spread out" or "layer": the flat gray sheet of an overcast day.
- Nimbus means "rain cloud". It is added to the other names, so a towering thundercloud is a cumulonimbus.
Look up after the puzzle and name the clouds you can see. It is the same sorting Howard did, two hundred years later.
🌡️ Celsius and Fahrenheit, Side by Side
Both temperature scales are on the list, and they measure the same thing with different numbers. Water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius, which is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and boils at 100 °C, which is 212 °F, at sea level. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit made his scale in the 1720s. Anders Celsius published his in 1742, but he ran it the other way, with 0 for boiling and 100 for freezing; it was flipped soon after he died. There is one temperature where the two scales agree: −40 is −40 on both.
🌀 One Storm, Three Names
Hurricane, typhoon and cyclone are all on the list, and they are the same kind of storm: a huge spinning system that forms over warm ocean water. The name depends on where it happens. Over the Atlantic and the northeast Pacific it is a hurricane, over the northwest Pacific it is a typhoon, and over the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific it is a cyclone. A tornado is different: far smaller, it drops from a thunderstorm over land and can come and go in minutes.
You can time a storm, too. Light reaches you almost at once, but sound takes about five seconds to travel a mile. Count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder and divide by five to get roughly how many miles away it struck.
📏 Which Words Fit Which Board
A word needs a board at least as wide as it is long. Heat Wave and Weather Vane are written as two words in the list and run together in the grid as HEATWAVE and WEATHERVANE.
| Size | Words that can appear | Left out |
|---|---|---|
| Small 9 × 9 | 51 of 56 | Temperature, Thermometer, Meteorologist, Fahrenheit, Weather Vane |
| Medium 12 × 12 | 55 of 56 | Meteorologist |
| Large 15 × 15 | All 56 | Nothing |
Several short words hide in longer ones. Rain sits inside Rainbow, Raincoat and Rainfall; Snow inside Snowflake; Wind inside Windy; Hail inside Hailstone. A puzzle never uses both words of a pair, because the short one would turn up twice.
🔍 Tips for This List
Hunt the Zs first. The ordinary filler letters on this page never include a Z, so every Z in the grid belongs to Drizzle, Blizzard or Breeze, or is a decoy copied from one of them. Drizzle and Blizzard have a double Z, which is hard to miss. Other doubles stand out the same way: puDDle, umbreLLa, chiLLy, brEEze, slEEt, degrEEs, typhOOn, monsOOn, flOOd. Y is useful as well, since Sunny, Cloudy, Windy, Chilly and Typhoon all end in or hold one. For more ways to speed up, see the main word search guide.
🏫 Ideas for a Weather Unit
- Weather diary: each morning, solve a Small puzzle and then circle the word that best matches the sky outside.
- Sort the finds: after the hunt, sort the found words into "things you can see", "things you can measure" and "things to wear".
- Cloud check: pair the puzzle with a walk outside to spot a cumulus or a cirrus.
Whatever the forecast, there is always another grid. 🌈 Try the winter word search for snow days, the space word search for the sky beyond the clouds, or the ocean word search.