Chinese Crossword Puzzles

A Chinese crossword, 填字游戏 ("fill-in-characters game"), puts one character in each square. 风雨 (wind and rain) takes two squares, 流星雨 (meteor shower) three, 调虎离山 four. Clues come in two lists, 横向 (across) and 纵向 (down), and answers can be as short as two characters, because most everyday Chinese words are exactly that long.

The difference from an alphabet puzzle is that a crossing square is not just a shared sound. It is a shared character, and usually a shared meaning. When 天经地义 crosses 下雨天, the square they share is 天, heaven or sky, in both. Solvers use that: a crossing character often tells you what the other answer is about, not only how it is spelled.

These puzzles are written in Simplified characters, the standard in mainland China and Singapore. The word list behind them mixed Simplified and Traditional spellings (一个 beside 一個), and every Traditional form was filtered out so a solver never has to switch scripts halfway through a grid.

The answers on this site use 3,683 different characters. Pick two at random and they share a character only 0.64% of the time. That is a quarter of the Korean figure (2.6%, where a crossing must match a whole syllable block) and nowhere near English letters, where two answers share one 79% of the time.

The grids fill anyway, because a few characters behave like vowels. 人 appears in 439 of the candidate answers, 不 in 403, 子 in 396 and 大 in 310, so answers tend to cross on those. Even so, a Chinese grid cannot be dense. Black squares take up about 38% of these boards, and many squares belong to only one answer, as in a Korean or a British cryptic grid.

Four-character idioms, 成语, are the backbone of Chinese word puzzles, and 132 of the 311 answers in these ten grids are four characters long: 调虎离山 (lure the tiger from its mountain), 鸡毛蒜皮 (chicken feathers and garlic skins, trivia), 一鼓作气. They cross each other easily because so many share a character like 一, 不 or 无.

Unlike Korean puzzles, which are almost all nouns, Chinese grids take verbs (打断, to interrupt), adjectives (严肃, serious) and set phrases as freely as nouns. Every answer here is one dictionary word that a word segmenter reads as a single unit, with a definition in Chinese Wiktionary behind it. Numerals, measure words, pronouns and fragments were left out.

The clues were written for these puzzles in plain modern Chinese, never copied from a dictionary. No clue contains two consecutive characters from its own answer, and none uses pinyin or English.