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 many solvers take it as the default meaning of “crossword”.

These are numbered križaljke instead. Each entry has a number in its first square, the clues are listed beside the grid under Vodoravno (across) and Okomito (down), and the shortest answer 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 single letters, sorted as units in a Croatian dictionary, and a traditional križaljka gives each one square. Here every square holds exactly one character, in every language, so LJUBAV is six squares rather than five.

The marked letters Č, Ć, Đ, Š and Ž each take their own square and must be typed as themselves. The difference matters: 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.

Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian share an alphabet and much of their vocabulary, and word lists often mix them. The answers here are standard Croatian, which is always ijekavian: MJESTO, VRIJEME, POSLIJE and UVIJEK, never the ekavian MESTO, VREME, POSLE and UVEK.

Many of the differences involve whole words: OTOK and OSTRVO (island), VLAK and VOZ (train), TVORNICA and FABRIKA (factory), KRUH and HLEB (bread), TISUĆA and HILJADA (thousand). Some Croatian words only look ekavian. SVET, MED, LET and SELO are ordinary Croatian answers.

The months are the clearest case. Croatian uses Slavic month names instead of the Latin ones most of Europe knows, and one puzzle on this shelf is built on them: VELJAČA, TRAVANJ, SVIBANJ, KOLOVOZ, STUDENI and RUJAN.