Zoo animals word search
Thirteen zoo animals are hiding in this grid, from a short lion to a whole crocodile. Words run in all eight directions here, so check the diagonals and read backwards too.
Curated by 
Esme Rook
·
Updated August 2026
Play it right here
Drag across the letters to select a word. Words hide across, down and diagonally, forwards and backwards. Works with mouse and touch.
Which animals are hidden in this word search?
Thirteen classic zoo residents: lion, tiger, elephant, giraffe, zebra, monkey, panda, hippo, rhino, penguin, flamingo, crocodile and koala. They hide in a 12x12 grid across all eight directions, so words also run diagonally and backwards, which makes this the flagship puzzle of the animal collection rather than a warm-up.
A tip that actually helps
Do not hunt the words in list order. Scan for the rare letters instead: the Z of ZEBRA and the K of KOALA can only live in a couple of spots, so every one you find is a live candidate. Rare letters are anchors; common letters are noise.
Print it or play it
The playable grid, the printable PDF and the solution sheet all come from the same generated puzzle, so what you solve on paper is exactly what you solve on screen. Print the PDF for the kitchen table or the classroom, and keep the solution page for whoever is refereeing. Want a different animal? The rest of the collection lives in the animal word searches category.
Seven animal word searches to print, one for each address
The board on this page is the zoo. Six more print from here and each one takes a place instead: the rainforest, the savanna, the desert, the farm, the sofa and, last, the names for a group of them. The arctic is missing on purpose, because the winter word search has a whole board of animals in winter, and the cubs are missing too, because the spring word search took the baby animals. The collective noun board is the one an adult stops on. Two word terms run together on the grid: poison dart frog is POISONDARTFROG, guinea pig is GUINEAPIG, fennec fox is FENNECFOX.
The 12x12 board on this page
The playable board above, printed: thirteen zoo residents rather than twelve, with CROCODILE and FLAMINGO as the long anchors and LION, four common letters, holding out until last.
The rainforest, 14x14: the loudest board here
A 14x14 board because POISONDARTFROG is fourteen letters on its own: the jaguar, the sloth, the toucan, the anaconda, the tapir, the macaw, the orangutan, the lemur, the chameleon, the iguana and the capybara.
The savanna: the ones the zoo board left out
The same plain as the board above, minus the five animals already on it: the wildebeest, the meerkat, the warthog, the hyena, the gazelle, the impala, the ostrich, the baboon, the cheetah and the jackal in a 12x12 grid.
The desert: twelve that need almost no water
A 12x12 board of animals built for heat: the camel, the scorpion, the fennec fox, the armadillo, the rattlesnake, the roadrunner, the jerboa, the oryx, the gila monster, the vulture, the dingo and the tortoise.
The farm: the animals with a job
The easiest of the six, a 12x12 board a five year old can finish: the rooster, the goat, the ram, the cattle, the horse, the goose, the alpaca, the llama, and the barn, the hayloft and the trough they live around.
The pets: the animals that live indoors
A 12x12 grid of everything a family has ever kept in a cage, a tank or an armchair: the hamster, the rabbit, the guinea pig, the parrot, the goldfish, the budgerigar, the ferret, the gerbil, the chinchilla and the canary.
The group names: a pride, a gaggle, a pod
The board nobody builds for children and the one an adult picks up: twelve collective nouns in a 12x12 grid, from the pride of lions and the pack of wolves down to the gaggle, the pod and the litter.
Same theme, different puzzle: Animal crossword puzzle
