Czech Crossword Puzzles

Czech puzzling is unusually organised — there are clubs, competitions and a vocabulary of puzzle types with strict rules — and the everyday křížovka carries a convention that these puzzles deliberately drop. Normally the point of a Czech crossword is the tajenka: a phrase, a proverb or a punchline spelled out by the letters in specially marked squares, revealed only when the grid is complete. The clue for it is often the puzzle's title, and the grid is really a machine for delivering it.

There is no tajenka here — the grid is the puzzle. Nor is this the švédská křížovka, which Czech names after Sweden as German does and which prints its clues inside the shaded squares with arrows: these are the numbered kind, with the clues listed beside the grid under Vodorovně and Svisle.

The thing a Czech solver will notice first: CH is a letter of the Czech alphabet, filed between H and I, and a traditional Czech křížovka gives it a single square. These grids give it two. That is a site-wide rule — one square holds one character in every language, which is also why Croatian's DŽ and Dutch's IJ take two squares here — but it does mean CHLÉB is five squares rather than four.

Everything else is kept exactly as written. Á, Č, Ď, É, Ě, Í, Ň, Ó, Ř, Š, Ť, Ú, Ů, Ý and Ž each take their own square and must be typed as themselves, with no folding onto the bare letter. In Czech that is not a nicety, because the mark is very often the whole word: MED is honey and MĚĎ is copper, RADA is a council and ŘADA is a row, MYS is a cape and MYŠ is a mouse, TVAR is a shape and TVÁŘ is a face.

One limitation follows. The .puz export format stores a single byte per square and predates Unicode, so it cannot hold Č, Ř, Š, Ž, Ě or Ů. It is switched off for Czech; puzzles are shared as links and printed to PDF, both of which keep the spelling intact.

Auto-fill draws on about 1,035,000 Czech entries, and that headline number hides an unusual shape. Czech is thickest at eight letters, with about 173,000 entries — more than any other language on this site — and then falls away faster than any of them too: 26,000 at thirteen and under 8,000 at fifteen. It is a language of medium-length words, and it runs out at the long end where German and Turkish are still comfortable.

The lattice layouts below sit right in that band, which is where answers like KLENOTNÍK, NEKONEČNO, PŘESKOČIT and VÝTVARNÍK come from. A dense American-style grid is not an option at any size — Czech filled none of them, for the same reason Polish does not: its short answers are dense with Č, Ř, Š, Ž, Ě and Ů, so they can only cross other answers carrying the same letter in the same place, and in a tight grid that runs out immediately.