Waves Word Search

Print 16 wave words with an answer key, or swap in sound, light or how waves behave.

Name Date

Waves Word Search

Find every word hidden in the grid. Words go across and down.

0 of 16 words found

CABSORPTIONIDTU

ULREFRACTIONBSG

LALBOIPWITLTTZD

CAWDTUEANOCEAMI

SOUNDBOVFXRRLIF

QTRANSVERSEFACF

CRZLMDTLAPSEORR

VOPUIPLERTTRROA

TUIMBHWNESJESWC

MGTEFTUGDSINEAT

BHCDQOATSEWCIVI

FYHIPHQHDNGESEO

HSIUXOZHSOKMMRN

BTNMKUTSUNAMIYE

FDUESMECHANICAL

This grid is wider and taller than its box. Slide it to see every letter.To drag, hold the first letter for a moment, then slide.Keyboard: Tab to the grid, arrow keys to move, Enter on the first and last letter.

WavelengthWAVELENGTH
CrestCREST
TroughTROUGH
MediumMEDIUM
TransverseTRANSVERSE
MechanicalMECHANICAL
SeismicSEISMIC
TsunamiTSUNAMI
MicrowaveMICROWAVE
InfraredINFRARED
RefractionREFRACTION
DiffractionDIFFRACTION
InterferenceINTERFERENCE
AbsorptionABSORPTION
SoundSOUND
PitchPITCH

16 of 24 words from the Waves Key Terms list.

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Answer key: Waves Word Search

CABSORPTIONIDTU

ULREFRACTIONBSG

LALBOIPWITLTTZD

CAWDTUEANOCEAMI

SOUNDBOVFXRRLIF

QTRANSVERSEFACF

CRZLMDTLAPSEORR

VOPUIPLERTTRROA

TUIMBHWNESJESWC

MGTEFTUGDSINEAT

BHCDQOATSEWCIVI

FYHIPHQHDNGESEO

HSIUXOZHSOKMMRN

BTNMKUTSUNAMIYE

FDUESMECHANICAL

WAVELENGTH, CREST, TROUGH, MEDIUM, TRANSVERSE, MECHANICAL, SEISMIC, TSUNAMI, MICROWAVE, INFRARED, REFRACTION, DIFFRACTION, INTERFERENCE, ABSORPTION, SOUND, PITCH

Next step Carry pitch and tone into the music puzzle Type in the terms from your own waves chapter

All 106 words

Parts of a Wave 20

Amplitude The size of a wave's swing, measured from its resting value to a peak.
Crest The highest point of a wave.
Cycle One complete repeat of a wave's motion.
Displacement How far a point of the medium has moved from its resting place.
Disturbance A change from the resting state; a wave is one that travels.
Equilibrium The resting value that a wave swings above and below.
Frequency The number of cycles in one unit of time, counted in hertz.
Medium The material a wave travels through: a solid, a liquid or a gas.
Oscillation A repeated back-and-forth change about a central value.
Peak The top of a wave, where the swing is greatest.
Period The time one full cycle takes: 1 divided by the frequency.
Phase How far through its cycle a wave is at a given moment.
Propagation The travel of a wave outward from its source.
Pulse A single disturbance that travels through a medium.
Rest position Where a rope or a water surface sits before any wave passes.
Speed How fast a wave travels: its wavelength times its frequency.
Trough The lowest point of a wave, the opposite of a crest.
Vibration A back-and-forth shaking of matter about a resting point; from the Latin for 'to shake'.
Wavefront The set of all points on a wave that have the same phase.
Wavelength The distance over which a wave's shape repeats, such as from one crest to the next.

Show all 106 words (86 more)

Kinds of Waves 21

Breaker A water wave that curls forward and breaks at its peak.
Compression The squeezed-together part of a longitudinal wave.
Fetch The distance over which wind blows across water to build waves.
Longitudinal Describes a wave that oscillates along the direction it travels, as sound does.
Mechanical Describes a wave that is an oscillation of matter, so it needs a medium.
Primary wave The fastest seismic wave and the first to arrive: the P wave.
Rarefaction The spread-out, low-pressure part of a longitudinal wave.
Ripple A small wave on water, governed by surface tension.
Rogue wave A large, unpredictable surface wave that can be extremely dangerous to ships.
Seiche A standing wave in an enclosed or partly enclosed body of water, such as a lake.
Seismic Describes the waves that travel through the Earth after an earthquake.
Shear wave The S wave of an earthquake, slower than the P wave; it cannot travel through gases.
Shock wave A disturbance that travels faster than sound does locally.
Surface wave A wave that travels along the boundary between two media, such as water and air.
Swell A series of ocean waves made by distant weather, not by the local wind.
Tidal bore The leading edge of an incoming tide forming a wave that travels up a river.
Transverse Describes a wave that oscillates at right angles to the direction it travels.
Tsunami A series of waves set off when a large volume of water is displaced; Japanese for harbor wave.
Wake The wave pattern on the water behind a moving boat.
Whitecap A water wave with a foam crest.
Wind wave A surface wave made by wind blowing over water.

Light and the Spectrum 19

Antenna A structure that turns electric currents into radio waves, and radio waves back into currents.
Beam A directed stream of light from a source.
Brightness How strongly a source appears to give off or reflect light.
Color What the eye perceives when light activates its cone cells.
Gamma ray The highest-frequency band of the electromagnetic spectrum; radioactive decay gives it off.
Infrared Electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths just longer than those of red light.
Microwave An electromagnetic wave shorter than other radio waves but longer than infrared.
Mirror An object that reflects an image; light bounces off it.
Opaque Describes an object that is neither see-through nor translucent.
Radar A system that uses radio waves to find the distance and direction of objects.
Radio wave The electromagnetic wave with the lowest frequency and the longest wavelength.
Rainbow An arc in the sky made when water droplets refract, reflect and disperse light.
Shadow A dark area where an object blocks light.
Translucent Describes a material that lets light through but scatters it.
Transparent Describes a material that lets light pass through without scattering it.
Ultraviolet Electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths shorter than those of visible light.
Vacuum Space empty of matter; light crosses it but sound cannot.
Visible light The band of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can see.
X-ray High-energy electromagnetic radiation, shorter in wavelength than ultraviolet.

How Waves Behave 22

Absorption The taking up of a wave's energy by matter, often as heat.
Angle The measure of a wave's direction against a surface.
Barrier An obstacle in the path of a wave.
Bend What a wave does when it refracts or diffracts.
Bounce What a wave does when it reflects.
Boundary The surface where one medium ends and another begins.
Cancel What a crest and a trough do when they meet.
Constructive Describes interference in which two waves in step add up to a larger one.
Damping The loss of energy that makes an oscillation die away.
Destructive Describes interference in which two waves out of step make a smaller one.
Diffraction The bending of waves around an obstacle or through an opening.
Dispersion The spreading of white light into colors because each frequency travels at its own speed.
Incident Describes the incoming wave, before it reflects or refracts.
Interference What happens when two waves meet and combine into one.
Overlap What two waves do when they cross the same place at the same time.
Polarization A property of transverse waves: the direction in which they oscillate.
Reflection A wave turning back at a boundary into the medium it came from.
Refraction The change in a wave's direction as it passes from one medium into another.
Scattering Waves being forced off a straight path by particles or rough spots in the medium.
Spread What waves do after they pass through a narrow opening.
Superposition The rule that where two waves cross, the result is the sum of the two.
Transmission The passing of a wave through a material.

Sound Waves 22

Acoustics The science of mechanical waves in gases, liquids and solids, sound among them.
Decibel The unit used for sound levels, one tenth of a bel.
Eardrum The thin membrane between the outer and middle ear that passes on sound's pressure changes.
Echo A reflection of sound that reaches the listener after a delay.
Harmonic A wave whose frequency is a whole-number multiple of the fundamental frequency.
Hum A wordless tone made with the mouth closed.
Loudness How strong a sound seems to the ear, on a scale from quiet to loud.
Microphone A device that converts sound into an electrical signal.
Noise Sound that is unwanted.
Octave The interval between two tones when one has twice the frequency of the other.
Pitch How high or low a sound seems; it follows the frequency.
Sonar A technique that uses sound, usually underwater, to navigate and to detect objects.
Sonic boom The sound of the shock waves made by an object flying faster than sound.
Sound A mechanical wave of pressure that travels through a solid, a liquid or a gas.
Speaker A device that turns an electrical signal into sound.
Supersonic Faster than sound, which travels at about 343 meters per second in air at 20 °C.
Timbre The quality that lets you tell a voice from an instrument on the same note.
Tone A steady, periodic sound with a clear pitch.
Tuning fork A two-pronged steel bar that rings at one constant pitch when struck.
Vocal cords Folds of tissue in the throat that vibrate to make the voice.
Volume The everyday word for how loud a sound is.
Whisper Speech made without vibrating the vocal cords.

Easy Waves 2

Light Electromagnetic radiation that the human eye can see.
Wave A disturbance that travels and carries energy from place to place.

How this list was compiled: Own work: the word list and every clue were written for this page. The facts in the clues were checked on 2026-10-08 against English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), among them the articles on the wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave), wavelength (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength), the transverse wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_wave), the longitudinal wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_wave), sound (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound) and the electromagnetic spectrum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum). Plain meanings were checked in Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/). Licence: own work

How it works

This waves word search covers the parts every diagram labels, Crest, Trough, Wavelength and Amplitude, then the kinds of waves, what they do at a boundary, sound, and light across the spectrum.

Read the full guide

A sound waves word search

Pick Sound Waves under Start from a list and the sheet prints under that title. Its 22 words cover what the ear judges, Pitch, Loudness, Tone and Timbre, and what carries or catches sound: Echo, Sonar, Tuning fork, Microphone and Eardrum.

Kinds of waves and how they behave

Kinds of Waves has 21 words, from Transverse and Longitudinal to Tsunami, Seiche and Shock wave. How Waves Behave has 22: Reflection, Refraction, Diffraction, Interference and Damping among them. Light and the Spectrum has 19, from Radio wave to Gamma ray. Easy Waves keeps to 24 words of 3 to 5 letters.

Wave reads inside Wavelength and Microwave, so the word itself appears only in Easy Waves.
X-ray hides without its hyphen, as XRAY; Radio wave and Gamma ray each hide as one run of letters.

Questions and answers

What are the parts of a wave?

The crest is the highest point and the trough the lowest. Wavelength is the distance from one crest to the next. Amplitude is the size of the swing from the resting value to a peak. Frequency counts the cycles in a unit of time.

What is the difference between a transverse and a longitudinal wave?

A transverse wave oscillates at right angles to the direction it travels. A longitudinal wave oscillates along that direction, in compressions and rarefactions. Sound waves are longitudinal.

Can sound travel through a vacuum?

No. Sound is a mechanical wave, so it needs a medium: a solid, a liquid or a gas. Light is an electromagnetic wave and crosses a vacuum. In air at 20 °C sound travels at about 343 meters per second.

Is this waves wordsearch free to print?

Yes, with no sign-up. The puzzle prints on page 1 and its answer key on page 2, on Letter or A4. For the forms of energy, print the energy word search.

All 106 words

Parts of a Wave 20

Kinds of Waves 21

Light and the Spectrum 19

How Waves Behave 22

Sound Waves 22

Easy Waves 2

How it works

A sound waves word search

Kinds of waves and how they behave

Questions and answers

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