WordiBop

Ancient Rome Word Search

113 words for the republic and the empire — the legions and their kit, the gods, the engineering, and the ordinary business of living in a Roman city. Three difficulties, printable in-page or as a PDF pack.

WordiBop.com — Ancient Rome Word Search

The concrete is still standing

Most ancient history is reconstruction — foundations, fragments, an educated guess about the roof. Rome is different, because a lot of it simply never fell down. The PANTHEON's dome has been the largest unreinforced CONCRETE dome on Earth for nineteen centuries and still is; nobody has beaten it. That's the strange thing about this word list: a fair number of these words describe objects you could go and stand inside on Tuesday.

  • 113 Roman words hand-picked for this puzzle's pool
  • 13 Roman gods to find, six of which are also planets
  • 4 pairs of near-identical words that can share one grid

Engineering you could still use

Roman CONCRETE was made with volcanic ash, and it does something modern concrete doesn't: seawater strengthens it rather than eating it, and cracks reseal themselves. Harbour walls poured two thousand years ago are in better condition than piers built in the 1960s. The AQUEDUCT arrived at a gradient so shallow it's measured in centimetres per kilometre. The HYPOCAUST was underfloor heating, abandoned for well over a millennium before anyone bothered to reinvent it. And the SEWER under the Roman forum — the Cloaca Maxima — was dug before the republic existed and still carries rainwater to the TIBER today.

The ARCH, the VAULT and the DOME are all in this grid because Rome made them structural rather than decorative, which is the whole reason the buildings are still up to be looked at.

Your calendar is a Roman document

The IDES in this grid is the reason “beware the Ides of March” sounds like a date rather than a riddle. Romans didn't count days forwards from the start of a month; they counted backwards from three fixed points — the Kalends, the Nones and the Ides — so a Roman date is always a distance from something. It's a genuinely worse system, and we kept the bones of it anyway.

We also kept the names. July and August are Julius CAESAR and AUGUSTUS, inserted into the year by men powerful enough to edit it. And September, October, November and December still mean seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth, because the Roman year originally began in March — the numbering has been two months out for over two thousand years and nobody has ever got round to fixing it.

Four words carrying more than they look

  • INSULA Latin for island. Roman apartment blocks were called islands because each one stood alone in a sea of streets — up to seven storeys, mostly timber above the ground floor, and prone to exactly the outcome you'd expect.
  • TESTUDO Tortoise. Interlocked shields over the heads and flanks of an advancing unit, named after the animal it obviously resembled. Roman military vocabulary is refreshingly literal.
  • DENARIUS A silver coin that outlived its empire by centuries. It's the ancestor of the dinar still spent across the Middle East, and it was the “d” in Britain's pre-decimal pence long after anyone remembered why.
  • RUBICON A stream so unremarkable that scholars argued for centuries over which one it actually was. Its entire fame rests on Caesar walking an army across it in 49 BC — the smallest river in history to become a synonym for the point of no return.

The gods changed their names at the border

Almost every deity in this list is a Greek god with Roman paperwork. JUPITER is Zeus, JUNO is Hera, MINERVA is Athena, NEPTUNE is Poseidon, VENUS is Aphrodite, MARS is Ares, MERCURY is Hermes, VULCAN is Hephaestus, DIANA is Artemis and BACCHUS is Dionysus. The Romans borrowed the stories more or less wholesale and swapped the names over.

And the Roman versions won. Look up: apart from our own, every planet in the solar system is named for a Roman god, and six of them — MERCURY, VENUS, MARS, JUPITER, SATURN and NEPTUNE — are hiding in the grid above. Uranus is the lone Greek holdout. Look at a French or Spanish calendar and the middle of the week belongs to MARS, MERCURY, JUPITER and VENUS too. English kept Saturn's day and gave Tuesday through Friday to Norse gods instead — a swap the vikings page will eventually get to.

Printing it for a Romans topic

Rome sits alongside Egypt as the ancient civilisation most classrooms actually teach, and the vocabulary load is the hard part — a pupil meets AQUEDUCT, CENTURION and PATRICIAN in the same week. The easy 10×10 hides nine words across and down only; the hard 14×14 asks for eighteen with diagonals and reversals switched on. HERCULANEUM is the one entry that needs a grid of at least twelve squares, so it appears on medium and hard only. The PDF button under the grid builds a pack of up to ten all-Rome puzzles with an answer key and an optional name-and-date line.

Elsewhere in the timeline

Ancient Egypt is live and covers the civilisation Rome itself regarded as impossibly old, while knights & castles and vikings pick up after the western empire goes. History one level up spans the whole timeline at once. Best times here are recorded on their own.