Seaside Crossword Puzzle - Free

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Here's a free Seaside crossword puzzle, a fun way to exercise your brain. Solve the puzzle online or print it out.

To solve it online, click the Solve Online button under the picture of the puzzle. This opens the crossword in a pop-up window.

This puzzle is part of the free online brain games collection. For a list of all my free crosswords, visit the Easy Printable Crossword Puzzles page.

Seaside Crossword Puzzle Instructions

If you like this Seaside crossword puzzle, check out the other word games on this site, including Hangman Classic and the free online word searches collection, which includes a Chemistry word search puzzle among many others.

And if you happen to know a child or adult with cognitive special needs, consider printing out and giving them some of my free Special Needs word search puzzles. These word searches have been simplified to make the puzzles more accessible to individuals with autism, traumatic brain injury, memory loss due to brain surgery, Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia, or other cognitive special needs. The solutions are included as well.

HOW TO PLAY. Using your memory and logic skills, use the provided clues to figure out the words hidden in the puzzle. The hidden words are arranged in a criss-cross grid, where the words overlap each other at common letters.

For the online version of the Seaside crossword, click any row or column to highlight it and display the clue. The clue is shown at the top of the puzzle.

If you have a guess for the answer for the clue, type it in the grid. As you work on the puzzle, you can go back and change any of the words you've typed in previously.

To print the crossword and solve it on paper, click the gear icon in the upper right of the puzzle window. Then click the "Printable Version" option to display the printable crossword.

To see the full solution online for the Seaside crossword, choose the "Show the Puzzle Solution" option in the gear menu.

The puzzle solution is also provided with the printable version. The solution appears on page 2.

Best of luck solving the puzzle!

Seaside Crossword - Interesting Facts About the Seashore

To help put you in the mood to solve this Seaside Crossword puzzle, here is some interesting information from Sciencing.com that you may not have known about the seashore:

Sand Stories and Beach Trivia. Sand, pebbles, shingle, gravel and other beach materials tell us about the local geology and environment around beaches. Rain washes soil from inland out to sea, and the finer particles of soil, such as clay and silt, are carried away, but the larger, heavier particles of sand are deposited along the shoreline.

The color of beach sand or other materials depends on the local geology. Hawaii has black beaches made of volcanic rock and green beaches made from a dense local mineral called olivine.

Pebble beaches occur near fast-flowing rivers and exposed shorelines, where the force of the water carries pebbles to the shore and heavy seas wash everything else away. Dead coral fragments ground up by waves make white sand beaches.
Sea Change. Beaches are ever-changing environments. Within one human lifetime, beach shorelines can grow or shrink by tens of feet due to the action of waves, wind, storms, floods and other weather extremes.

Waves can erode beaches and also carry material to other areas, widening shorelines. Waves erode the bases of cliffs until eventually they collapse onto beaches, changing the coastline overnight.

Wind blows sand beyond the waves and forms sand dunes that become colonized by plants. This vegetation slows the wind, preventing it from blowing the sand away, and the dunes grow larger over time. At the shoreline, waves pull sand along the sea floor, creating sand bars that heavy waves gradually push back toward the shore.
Beach Life. Organisms live in every area of a beach. Diatoms, algae and other microorganisms live in the sand -- large concentrations of diatoms give the sand a golden sheen.

Invertebrates such as ghost shrimp (Callianassa major) also live in sand, creating burrows you can sometimes see as small openings on the surface. Ghost crabs (Ocypode quadratus), blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus), pagurid crabs (Pagurus spp.), and many other crab species live on shorelines, and salt-tolerant grasses and other plants grow in dry beach areas.

Shore birds such as the sandwich tern (Sterna sandvicensis) nest in the bare sand of upper beach zones. Seals and other marine mammals rest on the sand, and land mammals such as foxes, raccoons and feral cats scavenge along beaches.