WordiBop

Landforms Word Search

120 words for the shape of the planet — the peaks, valleys, coasts, ice and rock that physical geography is written in. Three difficulties, printable in-page or as a PDF pack.

WordiBop.com — Landforms Word Search

The geography puzzle where guessing finally works

The other pages in this section hide proper nouns, and proper nouns are merciless: no amount of half-seeing HELSINKI tells you how it ends. Landforms are ordinary English words, so for the first time down here your instincts are worth something — catch three letters of WATERFALL and your eye finishes it before you've decided to. The catch is that these words come in families, and families share letters.

  • 120 terrain words hand-picked for this puzzle's pool
  • 9 different words in here for a dip in the ground
  • 16 are only four letters — CRAG, MESA, WADI, REEF

9 words for a hole in the ground

English didn't need this many words for a valley. It collected them, because different people arrived in different parts of the map and each brought their own. A GLEN is Gaelic. A DALE is Old Norse, which is why the Yorkshire Dales are dales — Viking settlement drew that boundary and the word never crossed it. GORGE is French, and it's the same word as the one in your throat. RAVINE is French too, but it started life meaning a violent rush of water, which tells you what carved it. CANYON came into English through Spanish in the American southwest, and ARROYO and WADI arrived the same way from Spanish and Arabic — both meaning a watercourse that's dry most of the year, a concept English had no use for until it went somewhere hot.

Read that list as a map of who went where. The vocabulary of terrain is a record of migration, and this puzzle is quietly full of it.

The ice left its vocabulary behind

The glacial words are the youngest in this list. Ice-age landforms needed names only once nineteenth-century geologists started mapping them, and the names got borrowed from wherever the fieldwork happened. That's why a puzzle about the shape of the earth contains a cluster of Irish and French:

  • DRUMLIN From Irish droimnín, a little ridge. Drumlins are the teardrop hills left under moving ice, and they come in swarms — the geologists who named them were standing in an Irish field surrounded by hundreds.
  • ESKER Irish eiscir, a ridge. An esker is the cast of a river that ran inside a glacier: gravel dropped by meltwater in an ice tunnel, left standing as a winding bank once the ice went.
  • ARETE French for fishbone. When two glaciers grind hollows into opposite sides of the same mountain, what's left between them is a ridge narrow enough to walk along — and it looks exactly like a spine.
  • KARST Not a description at all — a place. The Kras plateau above Trieste gave its name to every limestone landscape on Earth. GEYSER did the same thing: one particular Icelandic hot spring called Geysir now names all of them.

Words you can only understand from above

A few of these describe shapes nobody could have seen before flight. An OXBOW lake is a meander that bent so far it pinched itself off, leaving a curved pond beside the river — named for the U-shaped wooden collar of an ox yoke, because that's the only comparable curve a farmer had. DELTA works the same way, borrowed from the triangular Greek letter. ATOLL is a ring you can stand inside your whole life without recognising. Standing in one of these places tells you nothing; the name is the aerial photograph.

Printing it for physical geography

This is the vocabulary list behind most of the physical geography curriculum, which makes it the most directly useful worksheet in this section. The easy 10×10 hides nine words across and down only; the hard 14×14 asks for eighteen with diagonals and reversals switched on, so ESCARPMENT and PERMAFROST can arrive climbing a corner backwards. The PDF button under the grid builds a pack of up to ten all-landform puzzles with an answer key and an optional name-and-date line.

That completes the map

With this page the geography hub is finished: countries, capitals, US states and landforms, with the geography hub itself mixing all four. Elsewhere the animals word search is complete down to its five topics, and the daily word search deals everyone the same grid each morning. Best times here are kept on their own.