Cemetery Vocabulary: Headstones, Crypts and Mausoleums

Eleven words about cemeteries and how people remember the dead: burial, cemetery, crypt, grave, graveyard, headstone, mausoleum, memorial, monument, tombstone and vault.

It is respectful rather than scary, and fits a history lesson about old graveyards or Día de los Muertos as well as Halloween.

Cemetery Vocabulary: 11 Words to Find

Words run across, up and down, and diagonally; 7 of the 11 read backwards. The longest words are Graveyard, Headstone, Mausoleum and Tombstone, with 9 letters each.

Burial: The act of putting a body into a grave.
Cemetery: A place where people are buried, with graves and headstones.
Crypt: An underground room, often beneath a church, where the dead are buried.
Grave: A hole in the ground where a body is buried.
Graveyard: A burial ground, often next to a church.
Headstone: A stone set at the head of a grave, with the person's name and dates.
Mausoleum: A stone building in a cemetery that holds tombs above the ground.
Memorial: Something built or done to remember a person or an event.
Monument: A statue or building made to remember a person or event.
Tombstone: The carved stone marking a grave, with the person's name and dates.
Vault: An underground room for burying the dead, or for keeping valuables safe.

How to Solve the Cemetery Words Word Search

"Grave" hides inside "graveyard", so find the long word first. Three words start with M: mausoleum, memorial and monument. Three words run diagonally from top right to bottom left, the direction solvers most often forget.

History and Social Studies Activities About Cemeteries

Discuss the difference between a headstone, a monument and a mausoleum, and why people build them.
Connect it to Día de los Muertos and other ways cultures remember the dead.
Ask students to write a kind epitaph for a fictional character from a book they read.