Croatian Crossword Puzzles

What fills a Croatian puzzle magazine is the skandinavka: clues printed inside the shaded squares, arrows pointing at the answers, no numbering and no clue list. Croatian names it after Scandinavia, much as German names the same layout after Sweden, and it is common enough that many solvers use it as the default meaning of “crossword”.

These are numbered križaljke instead — a number in the first square of each entry and the clues listed beside the grid under Vodoravno and Okomito. The layouts are open lattices with longer entries rather than densely packed blocks, and the minimum entry is three letters.

Gaj's Latin alphabet has thirty letters, and three of them are written with two characters: DŽ, LJ and NJ. They are genuinely single letters — they sort as units in a Croatian dictionary, and a traditional križaljka puts each in a single square. These grids do not: every square on this site holds exactly one character, in every language, so LJUBAV is six squares rather than five.

The letters carrying marks are kept exactly as written and are not folded onto their bare forms. Č, Ć, Đ, Š and Ž each take their own square and must be typed as themselves, and the difference is load-bearing: KOZA is a goat and KOŽA is skin, SUMA is a sum and ŠUMA is a forest, SAV means all and ŠAV is a seam. Because those five sit outside the old single-byte encodings, .puz export is switched off for Croatian; puzzles are shared as links and printed to PDF instead.

Auto-fill draws on about 751,000 Croatian entries, and the hard part of building this shelf was not the size of that list but its citizenship. Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian share an alphabet and a great deal of vocabulary, and the sources a word list is built from do not separate them — so MESTO, VREME, POSLE and UVEK all arrive scoring as highly as MJESTO, VRIJEME, POSLIJE and UVIJEK, each with a real dictionary entry behind it. Left alone, a Croatian grid comes out half Serbian.

Standard Croatian is always ijekavian, so part of the family can be caught by rule. The rest cannot, because the two languages simply use different words — OTOK and OSTRVO, VLAK and VOZ, TVORNICA and FABRIKA, KRUH and HLEB, TISUĆA and HILJADA — and those had to be sorted by hand, carefully enough that SVET, MED, LET and SELO, which look like ekavian collapses and are ordinary Croatian words, stayed in.

The list is thickest at eight letters, with about 125,000 entries, which is the band the lattice grids spend in: POSLOVICA, PLIVAČICA, OPORAVITI, PEPELJARA. One puzzle on this shelf is built on the Croatian month names, which are the Slavic ones rather than the Latin ones the rest of Europe uses — VELJAČA, TRAVANJ, SVIBANJ, KOLOVOZ, STUDENI and RUJAN.