Crossword Maker

Your words, woven into a real crossword

Most crossword makers hand you a grid of your words laid side by side and call it a puzzle. This one builds an actual crossword: every word interlocked with another, numbered squares, Across and Down, and a solution that checks itself. It runs entirely in your browser, so your spelling list never leaves your device.

• 8–25 words: the range where nothing was ever left out, across 270 test weaves measured at build
• 15,019 clues you can borrow from, covering 8,854 answers — one button fills in the ones you'd rather not write
• 0 accounts, uploads and expiry dates. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and a link you share keeps working

There is no grid until your words arrive

Every other crossword on this site is built the same way: pick a grid shape we designed earlier, then hunt through thousands of answers for a set that fits it. That approach is useless here, because your word list isn't negotiable. If the puzzle is for Friday's spelling test, the puzzle contains those words and no others.

So the grid has to grow around the list instead. The first word goes down anywhere. Every word after it hangs off a letter already on the board — find a shared letter, lay the new word across it, keep going. That's the criss-cross construction, and it has a property worth knowing: there is no single right answer. The same eight words weave into a different shape every time, which is what the Shuffle layout button is for.

10 × 10 · 7 crossings

11 × 9 · 7 crossings

10 × 10 · 7 crossings

Same list, same rules, three different puzzles. None is more correct than the others — so if a layout leaves a word stranded, or simply looks awkward on the page, shuffling costs you nothing.

How long your list should be

Longer than you'd think, and shorter than you might hope. A word can only join the grid by crossing a letter already on it, so a short list is genuinely harder to weave than a medium one: with four words there are barely any letters to hang the next one on, and the last word often has nowhere to go. Add a few more and the problem disappears.

At the other end, the limit is the paper. A grid wider than 19 squares stops fitting an A4 sheet at a readable size, so the weaver refuses to grow past it — and around thirty words, that ceiling starts leaving words out.

• 4 words 93%
• 5 words 83%
• 6 words 97%
• 8 words 100%
• 12 words 100%
• 16 words 100%
• 20 words 100%
• 25 words 100%
• 30 words 53%

Highlighted: the lengths where nothing was ever left out. Both ends are worse than the middle — a 5-word list came out complete only 83% of the time, and a 30-word one 53%. Even at the far end almost every word still makes it (98% of them), and anything stranded is named under the preview so you can shuffle it in or swap it out.

The rule that makes it a crossword

Laying words next to each other is easy. What takes care is making sure the grid doesn't accidentally spell something nobody wrote. Put CAT immediately left of TREE on the same row and the puzzle now reads CATTREE — a seven-letter answer with no clue, which the solver will fill in correctly and be told is wrong.

So the weaver enforces one rule above all others: every unbroken run of letters in the finished grid is exactly one word you typed. Words may cross at a shared letter, but they may never run into each other end to end, sit side by side down their whole length, or lie along one another. It's the invariant the tool's test suite checks on every grid it builds, because it's the one a solver notices first.

Clues, or no clues

A clue goes after the word, separated by a comma, a tab, a dash or a colon — so a two-column spreadsheet pastes straight in. If writing twenty clues isn't how you want to spend the evening, Suggest clues fills in the empty ones from the 15,019 clues we've written for our own puzzles; they're yours to edit, and words we haven't clued are left for you.

You can also just not write clues at all, and the puzzle changes shape rather than breaking.

• With clues

  A crossword.

  Numbered squares, Across and Down, solved from the clues — the thing everybody pictures. Best when the words are the point and you want the solver to think about meaning.

• Without clues

  A fill-in.

  Every answer is printed in a word bank and the puzzle is working out where each one goes — the same game as our fill-in crosswords. Ideal for younger solvers and for spelling practice, and it switches itself on when clues are missing.

Two ways to hand it over

1. Download a PDF. One page: the grid, the clues in two columns, and a word bank if you asked for one. Options for an answer key on its own page you can keep back, a name-and-date line for a classroom, and large print. Clue lists longer than a page continue onto the next one rather than shrinking to nothing.

2. Copy a play link. It opens your exact crossword on this page, playable — type into the squares, use Check to see how you're doing, reveal a word when you're stuck. Nothing is uploaded to make that work: the words travel inside the link itself, which is why it can't expire and why we couldn't delete one if we tried.

Both come from the same puzzle you can see in the preview, so what you print is what they play. Use Test-play it to open the link yourself before you send it.

What happens to your words

Nothing you type is sent to us. The weaving, the preview, the PDF and the link are all built by your own browser; there is no account, no upload and no copy of your list on any server. A draft is kept in your browser's own storage so a closed tab doesn't lose your work, and clearing this site's data removes it.

The one thing to be aware of is the flip side of a link that never expires: treat it as public. Anyone who has it can open the puzzle, and we have no way to recall one. Words and clues are screened against a blocklist so a shared link can't publish a slur, but that's a filter, not moderation — what goes in the puzzle is yours.

Where to go next

Prefer a puzzle that's already made? The mini is five minutes, the midi is a proper sit-down, and the daily crossword deals one shared grid a day. Making something for a class? The word search maker and the word scramble maker take the same word list and turn it into a different worksheet, and the clue helper is there for whoever gets stuck.