Dutch Crossword Puzzles

The Netherlands and Flanders have two strong crossword traditions. The everyday one is the kruiswoordraadsel of the puzzle magazines, which leans on very short entries and a shared stock of puzzle words. That vocabulary even has its own reference book, the puzzelwoordenboek. The other is the cryptogram, a serious Dutch craft of wordplay with its own devices and a loyal following in the weekend papers.

The puzzles here belong to neither tradition exactly. Each is a numbered grid with the clues beside it under Horizontaal and Verticaal, and the clues are straight definitions. Every answer has at least three letters, so the two-letter filler that holds a magazine grid together does not appear.

This is the one thing a Dutch solver should know before starting. Dutch puzzles usually give the digraph IJ a single square, since it behaves as one letter and is capitalised as a unit in IJsselmeer. Here it takes two, because every square on this site holds exactly one character, in every language. Croatian DŽ and Czech CH get two squares for the same reason. WIJN is four squares, not three, and BIJZONDER is nine.

Accents are simpler. The diaeresis in RUÏNE or COÖRDINATIE marks a syllable break, not a different letter, so it comes off and the grid holds the plain 26 letters. That also means Dutch puzzles export as .puz files and open in Across Lite and other desktop solvers.

Dutch builds compound words the way German and Swedish do. The Dutch word list here has about 523,000 entries. It is thickest at eight letters, with about 59,000, and still has nearly 17,000 at fifteen. Long answers like ENTOURAGE, KUNSTMEST, EERBETOON and BEZWIJKEN come straight from everyday vocabulary.

The short end is odder. Dutch has plenty of three- and four-letter words, but many of them share the same first two letters and differ only in the last: BAK, BAL, BAN, BAR, BAS; KAM, KAN, KAP, KAR, KAS. When two short words have to cross, the choices narrow much faster than the raw count suggests.