Printable word scrambles

Five letters, and they spell the big orange cat with black stripes that hunts alone in the jungle. Write it in the boxes.

Start with the two letters that almost never sit apart in English and build outwards from them. Five letters is the shortest scramble on the page and the striped clue does most of the work for you.

These five letters spell the horse shaped animal of the African grassland whose coat is striped black and white. What is it?

One of these tiles is worth ten points in a tile game and there are very few English words it can begin. Put it first and the rest of the letters have almost nowhere else to go.

Five letters for the round black and white bear that lives in China and eats almost nothing but bamboo.

There are two of the same vowel here, which is the fastest hint you get: they sit in the second and the fifth box, and once you place them only three consonants are left to arrange.

Seven letters spell the black and white bird that cannot fly, waddles on land and swims beautifully in cold seas.

Seven letters, two of them the same consonant, and the word ends in one of them. Say the clue out loud and listen for the three syllables before you write anything down.

Eight letters for the largest land animal alive, the one with the long trunk and the enormous ears.

The PH pair is doing the work here. It makes one sound, not two, and once you spot that the eight tiles collapse into three ordinary syllables you already know how to say.

Nine letters spell the long green river reptile with the armoured back and the jaws full of teeth. Put them in order.

Nine tiles with a repeated consonant and a repeated vowel, which sounds hard and is actually the way in: the pairs alternate, so the word starts consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel.

Five letters for the flat round Italian supper that comes out of the oven covered in tomato and melted cheese and is cut into slices.

The doubled letter is the giveaway. In English almost no word carries that pair in the middle, and there is really only one supper it can possibly be.

Five letters spell a sweet orange tropical fruit with a single big flat stone in the middle of it. The same five letters spell an ordinary little word meaning surrounded by, so go by the meaning and not by the letters.

This is the trap on the sheet. The five tiles rearrange into two perfectly good words, one of them a fruit and the other a little preposition, so the letters cannot decide it and the clue has to.

Five letters for the baked loaf you slice for toast and sandwiches. Careful: the same five letters also spell the hair a man grows on his chin, and that is not food.

Five letters that are unusually generous: they make several real English words, including something you might grow on your face. Only one of them belongs on a food sheet.

Six letters spell the yellow food made from milk that melts on toast and that mice are supposed to love.

Three of the six tiles are the same vowel, which leaves only three consonants to place. Try the two that make a single sound together at the front and the word falls out.

Seven letters for the flat round breakfast you fry in a pan and eat with syrup or lemon and sugar.

Seven tiles, and the word is really two short words stuck together. Find the thing you fry things in, put it at the front, and the remaining four letters make a very familiar treat.

Eight letters spell the lunch you make by putting a filling between two slices of bread. It is named after an English earl.

Eight tiles and only two vowels, so the consonants have to do the shaping. Look for the pair that makes a single hushing sound and put it right at the end.

Four letters for the shining thing that goes on the very top of the Christmas tree. Watch out, because these four letters spell several other words as well.

Four tiles and the busiest letter set on the whole page: they make at least four different English words, including some rodents and some things you hang in a gallery. The season decides which one.

Five letters for the winged figure who sings above the stable in the Christmas story and who often tops the tree instead of the star. The same letters also spell a shape made by two lines meeting, so read the clue.

Two of these words are so close that schoolchildren mix them up for years: one has wings and one is measured in degrees. Nothing in the letters separates them, so read the clue twice.

Five letters for the dark green plant with prickly leaves and bright red berries that gets hung around the house in December.

A doubled consonant in the middle and a vowel doing consonant duty at the end. Once you see which letter has to finish the word, the other four sort themselves out immediately.

Six letters spell the vehicle with runners instead of wheels that slides over snow and gets pulled through the sky on Christmas Eve.

The GH ending is the key and it is silent, which is exactly why it hides. English has a small family of words that end that way, and only one of them slides over snow.

Seven letters for the figure children build in the garden out of three rolled balls, with a carrot for a nose and coal for eyes.

A compound word: two short everyday words joined together, and the second one is only three letters long. Find the three letter one first and the rest is quick.

Eight letters spell the antlered animal of the far north, the one that pulls the sleigh and whose most famous member has a red nose.

Three of one vowel and two of one consonant, which makes this the hardest of the six. Both of the repeated consonants end a syllable, and the word finishes with the same two letters it uses in the middle.

Three words in the wrong order. Put them back into the saying that tells you the only way to get good at something is to keep doing it.

Only three chips, so there are just six possible orders and five of them are nonsense. The verb goes in the middle, which is true of almost every short saying in English.

Four words, shuffled. Rebuild the saying you use to forgive someone who has turned up long after they should have.

A comparison, so look for the two words that always travel as a pair with something in between them. Once that frame is built there are only two chips left to place.

Five words out of order. Rebuild the saying that means what a person does counts for far more than what a person promises.

Two plural nouns and a comparison sitting between them. Work out which of the two is being praised and which is being dismissed, and the whole line assembles from the outside in.

Six words, shuffled, and two of them are the same. Rebuild the saying about getting up first if you want the reward. Reading it the other way round makes sense too, so go by the meaning.

Both articles are here and the sentence reads perfectly well backwards, which is the whole difficulty. Decide who is doing the catching before you write, because the grammar will not tell you.

Six words in the wrong order. Rebuild the saying you offer someone in a bad patch to promise there is something good hidden inside it.

One chip is a single letter and it belongs immediately before the two words that describe each other. Build that little group of three first and the other half is obvious.

Eight words, shuffled. Rebuild the warning against deciding what something is worth from the way it looks on the outside.

Eight chips, the longest here, and it is an instruction rather than a statement. Two of them make the negative that has to open the line, and the possessive near the end tells you what belongs to what.

Seven letters spell the enormous square based stone tomb the ancient Egyptians raised on the edge of the desert.

Seven tiles and only two obvious vowels, because one letter here is pretending to be a consonant at the front and behaving like a vowel further in. Work out which and the word appears.

Eight letters for a long piece of music in several movements, written for a full orchestra. Beethoven wrote nine of them.

Two of the same rare letter, and they both behave as vowels. One opens the second position and the other has to close the word, which pins them before you place anything else.

Seven letters spell the slow river of ice that grinds its way down a mountain valley and carves the rock as it goes.

A slippery one in more ways than the obvious. The same seven letters also spell an uncommon adjective meaning slender and graceful, so the clue about the mountain is doing real work here.

Nine letters for the canopy of silk that opens above you and slows the fall after you jump out of an aircraft.

Nine tiles with two of the same vowel, and a shorter word for the air is hiding inside the second half. Find that and you have five of the nine letters placed at once.

Nine letters spell the winding structure of passages built for King Minos to hold the Minotaur, and the word we still use for anything you can get lost inside.

Nine tiles, one vowel that is not really a vowel, and a Greek shape to the whole thing. The TH at the end is the anchor: fix it there and work backwards.

Twelve letters, the longest on the page. It is the tube you turn and look down, where mirrors turn a few loose beads into an endlessly changing pattern.

Twelve tiles is the longest on the page and brute force will not get you there. It is built from two Greek pieces, one meaning beautiful shape and one meaning to look at, so cut it in half and solve each part.