Crossword puzzles are notoriously difficult to build. This is the fastest tool for making a themed NYTimes or Guardian style crossword puzzle with your own theme words, autofill, and automatic clues.
Sketch a grid (or generate one), add a few theme words, and hit to have a solver fill the entire grid in seconds from a 560,000-word database. The autofill heavily favors words that you know, so that your puzzles will be fun to solve. You can edit your clues, print it, share and publish it online.
Getting started
How to use the Crossword Generator
Everything starts with the button (go ahead and click that one; it'll scroll you right up to the real thing). Pick a grid size, then start from a generated pattern, a blank grid you draw yourself, or a few theme words for the puzzle to be built around.
Sometimes you'll hit Auto-Fill and it just can't finish. Some layouts genuinely have no clean fill. When that happens, swap the layout: click under the grid to cycle through fresh black-square patterns, then Auto-Fill again. A new arrangement usually fills on the first try.
Clues are generated automatically as the grid fills in, but a few answers won't get one, and you'll probably want to rewrite some in your own voice anyway. Open the tab in the shelf beside the grid to fill in the blanks, tweak any clue, or lean on an AI suggestion when you're stuck.
Three steps
How it works
1
Start a grid
Pick a size and generate black squares, draw your own, or paste in a few theme words to build the puzzle around.
2
Auto-fill it
The generator searches a 560,000-word database and fills every slot with answers that cross cleanly, not just the words you typed. Lock the ones you like and re-fill the rest.
3
Clue, print & share
Add clues (or get a few AI suggestions when you're stuck), then print a blank sheet plus an answer key, save it, or publish it for anyone to solve.
The backstory
Why a crossword generator?
Back in the twenty-teens, my friends and I did the New York Times crossword every morning at Cobra Club in Bushwick. This spot was a bar in the evening and a coffee shop in the morning. We'd usually get there right as the paper was arriving and work through it with the staff and regulars.
And then at some point we started talking about making a Bushwick-themed crossword, and I took a crack at building one.
Turns out it's pretty hard to make a NYTimes-style crossword puzzle, especially around your own theme words. I spent a few days wrestling the grid into a shape that can even be filled, and never got to the fun part of writing clues.
So I started working on building one. This is the result: you bring the theme words, and it does everything else, from generating crossword grids to autofilling the puzzle and even helping make good clues.
Clues & answers
FAQs for Crossword Generator
Start a grid, add a few theme words (or none), and hit Auto-Fill to complete the rest. Then write or generate clues and print or publish. The whole thing takes a couple of minutes.
Yes. Add your words as the theme and the generator builds the grid around them, filling the remaining slots with crossing answers from its database. You get a full crossword, not just your words shuffled into a criss-cross.
It does. A constraint solver (MAC backtracking with random restarts) searches a 560,000-word database and fills a standard 15×15 in a few seconds, preferring common, familiar words over obscure crosswordese. Lock any entry to keep it and re-fill around it.
No, actually. It uses a custom-built constraint solver that generates the crossword by brute force: searching a 560,000-word database and testing combinations until every across and down entry crosses cleanly. The one optional exception: when you're stuck on how to clue a word, you can ask for a few AI suggestions. The puzzle itself is pure algorithm.
In my experience, AI isn't very good at generating a crossword from scratch. It can be useful as an editor, though: choose File > Download JSON, send that file to Claude or Codex and ask it to improve the clues for your theme, then choose File > Import to bring the edited JSON back and finish your puzzle.
I made this for regular folks who want to quickly design a NYT-style crossword for a gift, a classroom, a party, a proposal. That said, the grid-filling engine underneath is the same kind constructors use professionally, so pros are welcome too: lock your seed entries, re-fill sections around them, and print a clean copy.
The answers come from two open word lists, Crossword Nexus (MIT-licensed, scored for how crossword-friendly each entry is) and ENABLE (public domain), about 560,000 entries in all. The clues are drawn from archives of common clues, plus optional AI suggestions when you want something fresher.
No. Custom clues you write stay in your puzzle — they're never added to our clue database. The one exception is AI-generated clues, which may be saved so they can be suggested to other constructors.
Yes! Printing is one of the best uses of the Crossword Generator, because it makes a great gift, and it links to the published version here online. That way you can fill it out by hand using a pen OR complete the puzzle on your phone, tablet, or desktop.
Yes, the Crossword Generator is free for up to 13×13 puzzles. A paid membership unlocks bigger grids (15×15 NYTimes-style Standard through 23×23 Sunday) plus AI clue suggestions. This paid subscription also includes other tools across texs.org, including the VHS Label Maker and more.
Not to start: jump in and build. Sign in with your texs.org account to save your puzzles and keep drafts across devices, or publish one to the Showcase for anyone to solve.
The editor
Who made this Crossword Generator
Hi, I'm Tex and I made the crossword generator so that anyone can quickly make a fun themed NYTimes-style crossword puzzle. I've got some more cool projects that you can see back at texs.org! Feel free to email me or send me a DM:
