The seven great landmasses
Our planet is usually divided into seven continents, and this word search gathers them all. You'll track down the giants — ASIA, AFRICA, EUROPE and AUSTRALIA — the icy ANTARCTICA at the bottom of the world, and the AMERICA landmass that spans north and south.
Each puzzle pulls a fresh selection from the list, so the map changes every time you play — gentle on Easy, and a Hard-mode expedition once the diagonals and backwards words appear.
How many continents are there, really?
Seven is the usual answer, but it's not the only one — some countries teach five or six, combining Europe and Asia into 'Eurasia' or treating the Americas as one. However you count them, ASIA is by far the biggest and most crowded, home to more than half the world's people, while ANTARCTICA is the coldest, a frozen wilderness with no permanent residents at all. AUSTRALIA (sometimes grouped with its neighbours as OCEANIA) is the smallest.
The continents are separated by the great oceans, and we pin them down using an invisible grid drawn on the GLOBE. The EQUATOR circles the middle, splitting Earth into a northern and southern HEMISPHERE, while lines of LATITUDE and LONGITUDE let us give any place an exact address.
Mapping the world
This puzzle doubles as a mini map lesson, hiding the tools we use to read the world: the ATLAS and GLOBE, the COMPASS that keeps us pointing the right way, the POLE at each end of the Earth, and the warm band of the TROPICS either side of the equator. It's a great fit for a geography lesson on the world map.
Play, print or make your own
Play online, or print a PDF pack for a geography lesson. Want a grid of just the continents, or just the map vocabulary? Use our Make Your Own tool to choose the words and print matching copies for the class.