350 wordsearches now downloadable for free

The 350 French wordsearches may now be downloaded for free, in exchange for a Twitter/Facebook mention.

French wordsearches reinstated

Eagle-eyed users of the French Linguistics web site will have noticed that the French wordsearches were not working over this weekend. The problem appears to have been caused by an update performed on Friday evening and has now been fixed. Apologies for the inconvenience caused to our wordsearch addicts.

350 new French wordsearches

Whether you're a wordsearch addict quarantined in your home during a swine flu outbreak, or a teacher looking for an end-of-term activity, you may be interested in the new set of 350 French wordsearches now available from the French Linguistics site. A small charge is made for the download, but the wordsearches cover more topics, come in more sizes, and include answers.

The sample of free wordsearches and crosswords is still also available, and in any case, you're advised to try these to make sure that the wordsearches will suit your needs if you decide to go for the whole set of 350.

Teachers may be interested to know that the 5 USD download fee also include permission to print out and/or photocopy any of the wordsearches as many times as you require for distributing to teachers/students at your establishment (or to any of your private students if you're a private French tutor). Similarly, if you're a student, you may give printouts of the wordsearches to any of your classmates/coursemates.

The wordsearches are downloadable in PDF format. You'll need a PDF reader such as Adobe Reader (downloadable free of charge for most platforms). Strictly speaking, you need a reader than can read PDF format 1.2 or later. On mainstream platforms, that means practically any PDF reader in the world. If you're using a more "exotic" platform such as a ZX Spectrum / Commodore Amiga etc, please check!

New crossword and wordsearch categories

Some new on-line crossword and wordsearch themes have been added:

• Computers and the Internet wordsearch includes vocabulary to do with files, documents, web pages and parts of the computer; a Computers and Internet crossword is also available on this theme;
• Jobs and Professions wordsearch includes names of various jobs and professions;
• The Around Town crossword features names of various buildings and basic words used in asking for directions;
• The Sport and the Olympic Games crossword features various vocabulary relating to sport generally, and includes French names of various events from the Olympic Games.

Note that to play these on-line word games, your browser must support Java. But in practice, most browsers already do.