Make a custom crossword in seconds — enter your own words and clues, or auto-generate from 400+ curated words by topic and difficulty. Print blank for students or share a link anyone can solve.
Word generators, games, and puzzle tools — all free
A crossword puzzle generator makes a crossword puzzle out of the words you select. It arranges the words so that each word intersects other words at least once, in a crossword-puzzle-like pattern. The result is a solvable crossword puzzle: a blank grid with numbered clues to fill in the correct words. Traditionally, creating a crossword by hand is time-consuming and requires graph paper for planning. The generator does all the work of laying out the words in the grid for you.
Custom vocabulary puzzles for teachers & curriculum designers. It's also a way for hobbyists to create a crossword on a topic of their choice without entering everything manually. In both cases, the output is a printable grid, a numbered list of clues, and a URL you can share so others can play in their browser.
Crossword puzzles are perhaps one of the best methods for vocabulary reinforcement. Studies of language learning have shown time and again that words learned in a 'retrieval' context, i.e., in circumstances where the student has to retrieve the word from memory in order to write it down (as opposed to 'dense' recognition of individual words on flashcards, for example), are learned far better than those learned in other ways. The crossword forces the student to understand the definition of a word and then to write it. It forces them to complete a word given the first letter. And it even shows up spelling errors in the completed word within the grid.
In addition to using crosswords in the classroom, crosswords are also great for groups learning outside of the classroom. Families can have fun learning together at family game nights. Coworkers can test their knowledge of each other in an office trivia contest. And many people already enjoy pub quizzes where they can test their knowledge on a particular topic. In the past, making a crossword on a particular topic would require specialized software or many hours of tedious work. Now it only takes 30 seconds to make a crossword of almost any size and topic. Simply enter the words and clues that you want to use and click Generate. Then you can print out the puzzle or share it with others.
This generator is a client-side application running entirely within your browser, so no data of any sort is ever transmitted to any server. To generate a crossword, the layout algorithm first sorts your words by length (longest first), then places the longest word in the center of the grid horizontally. It then examines each word, looking for letters it has in common with words it has already placed in the grid. Each shared letter becomes a candidate for an intersection with the new word. The algorithm scores candidates by the number of letters they connect together and by how compact the resulting grid is. It then places the chosen word at the highest-scoring intersection point for that word. Words containing no common letters with the rest of the grid words are ignored.
Auto-Generate mode uses a set of 400+ carefully selected words, grouped by difficulty and category. Custom mode reads in a textarea line by line, with each line containing a WORD and a corresponding Clue, and runs that through the same layout engine.
Medium-length words of 4 to 10 letters are best for word length. Short words of 2 to 3 letters are very hard to make into interesting clues and generally do not intersect with other words well. Long words of 12+ letters can make the grid too wide or unevenly shaped. A grid with 5 five-letter words, 5 seven-letter words, and a few 9-letter words has very good density.
Target your audience with word clues. Young students and beginners can be clued with direct definitions such as OCEAN = The largest body of water on Earth. More advanced words can be clued with less direct definitions. For example, the word OCEAN could be clued as Titanic's final resting place. Avoid word clues that are too similar to each other. For example, two clues to words that are types of trees would have the solver guessing randomly rather than trying to solve the word. Need more vocabulary ideas? Pull from the Random Word Generator.
The word count should be in the region of 10-20 words to ensure that the grid does not look too sparse if it contains fewer than 8 words and too crowded if it contains more than 25 words. Classroom puzzles typically contain 12-18 words.
The algorithm has fewer options for creating intersection points between words of the same length; thus, many words will get dropped when creating such a grid. Include a few words of very short length to provide more shared-letter opportunities for longer words.
We will fit up to 30 of your words into the grid in what we call "interlocking" fashion. That is, we try to interlock as many of your words as possible together in the grid using shared letters. Ideally, we can interlock about 10-20 words together in this way.
Unconnected words are ignored and not placed on the grid. A word count is shown below the grid. If this is less than the number of words you added, look for words that share common letters. The most intersection-friendly letters in English are E, A, R, S, and T.
For auto-generate mode, word list selection is based on the specified difficulty. For Easy mode, we use a list of very short, very common 3-6 letter words. For Medium mode, a list of moderate vocabulary for 5-9 letters is selected. For Hard mode, a list of more advanced/technical words for 7-12 letters is used. (For Custom mode, the difficulty setting has no effect, and the words you enter determine the difficulty of the resulting puzzle.)
After generating a crossword, click the Share Link. This creates a URL that not only allows others to solve this same crossword in the browser of their choice, but also completely encodes the crossword's words, clues, and even layout into that URL.
Yes. Print a blank grid by clicking the Print Blank option to bring up the print dialog for a grid printed with all letters hidden. This grid is accompanied by the corresponding clues printed as a list numbered in order. Print the answers by clicking Print Answers to print the grid filled in with the correct solution.
No, all word generation takes place within your browser. No words are sent to a server, and thus no words are stored in a database. Persistence of the generated puzzle takes the form of the Share Link, which simply encodes the puzzle into the URL. Closing the tab containing the word generator tool with no sharing or printing of a puzzle having taken place results in all generated words being lost.
Proper nouns in full (e.g., PARIS, Capital of France) work fine. Multi-word phrases don't work, as each word must be a single unbroken string of letters. You can enter WHITEHOUSE instead of WHITE HOUSE or pick one meaningful word from the phrase to use as the single word for the completed puzzle grid. Non-letter characters such as spaces and hyphens are stripped from the word field.
The grid automatically resizes to fit the words entered. For a 20-30 minute classroom activity, a grid size of 12-15 words (centered) will produce a grid that fits on a single sheet of paper with adequate space between the lines for students to write their answers, and will be completed in about the right amount of time.