A relaxing word search adventure where every puzzle you solve helps a botanical garden — and a whole greenhouse of progress — grow right alongside it. Challenge your brain, grow your collection, nurture something beautiful. Built as one codebase that runs natively on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, and installs straight from a browser tab everywhere else, including iOS.
chipcreates.github.io/WordSprout — zero install, works offline after the first visit
Prefer a native app? Grab the latest build for your platform:
| 🪟 Windows | 🍎 macOS | 🐧 Linux |
| 🤖 Android | 📱 iPhone/iPad — see below ↓ |
All native builds live on the Releases page — grab the file for your platform and OS version. Full install steps (and what to do about the "unknown publisher" warning you'll see, since none of this is code-signed) are in INSTALL.md.
There's no App Store listing — Apple's Safari lets you install the web version as a real app instead, icon and all, with full offline play:
- Open chipcreates.github.io/WordSprout in Safari (this only works in Safari, not Chrome).
- Tap the Share button (the square with an arrow pointing up).
- Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
- Tap Add in the top-right corner.
Word Sprout now sits on your home screen with its own icon, opens full-screen with no browser chrome, and keeps working with the phone in airplane mode.
From quick themed puzzles to a thriving collection of exotic plants, Word Sprout is a peaceful escape and a brain-boosting ritual in one — three ideas running through everything below: challenge your brain, grow your collection, nurture beauty.
🔍 Find hidden words
113 hand-curated categories, and none of them get old. Choose from Easy, Standard, or Challenging word pools, including familiar themes such as Animals, Food, and Sports alongside tougher Chemistry, Legal Terms, Etymology, and Cryptic/Obscure Adjectives categories. Boards grow from a gentle 3×3 up to 8×8 on Easy, 4×4 to 10×10 on Standard, and 5×5 to 12×12 on Challenging, so the game keeps pace with how good you're getting instead of staying easy forever. On narrow touch screens, dense boards scale down automatically to keep each letter comfortable to select.
Make the rotation your own. Search and select favorite categories in Settings, then turn on the favorites-only option when you want a more personal route through the garden. The game remembers your choices and keeps recently used words from repeating immediately when a favorite category comes around again.
Bonus words are hiding in plain sight, too. The list on the side isn't the whole puzzle — drag out any real English word hiding in the grid, not just the ones asked for, and bank bonus Seeds for it. There are 125,312 of them to find, courtesy of the full ENABLE word list, so the board is a lot more generous than it looks.
Stuck? Your tactical toolkit has you covered. Seeds buy you out of trouble, not just around it:
| Power-up | What it does | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 🔍 Single Letter Sprout | Reveals a target word's starting letter | 50 Seeds |
| 🌀 Lumina Cyclone | Reshuffles the board — progress stays intact | 100 Seeds |
| 🌱 Super Root Hint | Instantly reveals and solves an entire word | 250 Seeds |
| 🧭 Bioluminescent Compass | Points a directional guide at your next word | 350 Seeds |
| 🔬 Flora Spectrometer | Lights up every unfound word's starting cell | 500 Seeds |
| 🧪 Nitrogen Booster | Doubles Seed rewards for the rest of the level | 600 Seeds |
Levels that actually celebrate you. Clear one and every found word bar collapses into a large glowing dot. A fast constellation sweep connects all of those dots in discovery order, holds for a beat, then the whole board dissolves to reveal the category art underneath — closing with the action buttons gliding into place. It's a small thing. It still feels great every single time.
Your rank grows with you. Ten Botanist ranks — from Seedling Scout up through Cosmic Conservator — unlock as you level up, each with its own title and avatar. Hit the next tier and a short promotion ceremony marks the occasion.
28 achievements dare you to keep climbing. From First Bloom (finish your very first level) to Canopy Legend (reach level 100) to the sneaky Diagonal Detective (find a word placed on the diagonal), there's a badge tracking almost everything you do — including bonus words, reverse finds, hint-free runs, plant blooms, categories, and power-up use — visible any time from the trophy case. Rotating Field Notes add three short garden tasks at a time for extra Seed rewards.
The Moonlit Conservatory grows while you play. Spend Seeds on any of 20 plants, spanning seven rarity tiers from Common moss up to a single Cosmic Ficus that'll run you 20,000 Seeds. Water each one every two hours to advance growth, or pay a scaled fertilizer cost to skip the wait — once a plant hits full bloom it pays a partial rebate, from 50 Seeds for the free starter Moss Sprout to half the purchase cost for purchased plants. It's a collection goal running quietly underneath the word search.
Neglect a plant and it can fall sick. Blight, mildew, aphids, and slugs are a real threat, but only ever while you're actually playing — nothing in the garden decays while the app is closed, and severity always caps at "critical," never automatic loss. The only cure is a Garden Remedy charge, and the only way to earn one is finding a gardening-related word as a bonus find in any puzzle's category, not just a Gardening-themed one — so a sharp eye for off-list words during an unrelated puzzle pays off back home in the greenhouse. Treating a plant is always a deliberate choice, and so is composting one that's gotten critical, which refunds Seeds instead of just losing it for nothing.
The Seed Store is worth saving up for. Beyond power-ups and plants, Seeds unlock two full cosmetic environment themes — the amber Autumn Canopy and the deep-sea Ocean Trench — plus an exclusive glowing Golden Sprout Crest for your botanist profile, for players willing to grind to the top.
Underneath the collecting and the climbing, Word Sprout is still just a calming word search — the kind of thing you open for two minutes and stay with for twenty. The responsive play surface supports touch and keyboard navigation, and the mobile Field Kit keeps power-ups and Field Notes within easy reach without crowding the board. The web build is a fully installable, offline-capable PWA, and real native apps cover Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android besides — so there's no platform, and no five minutes of downtime, where you can't pick it back up.
Play. Grow. Thrive.
Word Sprout is open source, and contributions are welcome — bug reports, feature ideas, and pull requests alike. Want to build it yourself, poke around the code, or ship a fix? INSTALL.md has the full technical rundown: tech stack, prerequisites, and build commands for desktop, Android, and the web PWA.