This is the public shelf of the Crossword Generator, the fastest tool for making newspaper-style crosswords (you can literally make one in just a few seconds). And once you’ve built a puzzle you like, you can submit it to be published here for anyone to solve online. And you can also print any crossword puzzle here, complete with the clues. Pass them around on paper! Physical media!
The puzzles on this shelf were made and published by other people using the Crossword Generator tool on this site. Using this tool you can make NYTimes and Guardian-style crosswords as well as criss-cross style, and they're all free to solve. You don't need an account, and there's nothing to install.
Click any puzzle to solve it right in your browser. Your progress saves on your device, and you can reveal an entry from the clue list when you're stuck. Prefer pencil and paper? Every puzzle prints as a clean blank sheet with a separate answer key, and each printout carries a QR code back to its online version.
Format
Mots croisés, and how the French usually number them
A traditional French grid is clued differently from an English one. French mots croisés number the rows 1, 2, 3 down the side and letter the columns A, B, C along the top, then clue a whole line at a time: “Horizontalement — 1. …” covers everything in the first row, and two definitions if the row holds two words. Nothing is numbered inside the grid at all.
These puzzles use the international convention instead — a number in the first square of each entry, one clue per entry, listed under Across and Down. What a French newsstand sells more of than either is mots fléchés, with the definitions printed inside the dark cells and arrows pointing at the answers; those are not built here. Nor is the French clue tradition attempted: the oblique, pun-driven definitions that made Perec and Scipion famous are a craft of their own, and the clues here are plain rather than devious.
Alphabet
Accents come off, which is what French crosswords already do
A French grid holds twenty-six letters and no accents. É, È, Ê, À, Ù, Ô, Î and Ç all go into the square as their bare letter, so ÉTÉ is gridded ETE and FRANÇAIS is FRANCAIS. That is not a shortcut but the standard convention in French puzzles, and it is why a solver never has to decide whether a square wants É or È.
The two ligatures are worth saying explicitly, since they are single characters rather than accented letters: Œ becomes OE and Æ becomes AE, so CŒUR occupies five squares and reads COEUR. The generator converts as you type, so a word entered with its proper spelling still lands in the grid correctly.
Word list
A vocabulary that runs out of long words early
Auto-fill draws on about 364,000 French entries, and the shape of that list is what decides how a French grid behaves. It is thickest at seven letters — about 57,000 — then falls away quickly: 24,000 at eleven, 9,000 at thirteen, under 3,000 at fifteen. Swedish and Turkish are still offering tens of thousands at that length, because they build compounds and stack suffixes. French does neither, so the long slots are where a French grid gets hard.
Which is why most of the puzzles below are tight American-style grids at 7×7 to 13×13 rather than long lattices: that layout spends its entries where French is deep. The answers come out as ordinary words — CLAVICULE, COUVERCLE, ROULEMENT, OBSCURITÉ — rather than the abbreviation soup a frequency-ranked list produces if you let it.
Questions
French crosswords, answered
Yes. Every puzzle on this page can be solved in the browser at no cost, and printed with a blank grid and a separate answer key.
Traditional French mots croisés clue a whole row or column at a time, with the rows numbered and the columns lettered around the edge. These puzzles use the international convention instead — one number in the first square of each entry, and one clue per entry — because that is what the generator builds and what prints and shares cleanly.
No. French crossword grids drop accents by convention, so É, È, À, Ô and Ç all go in as their bare letters. Œ and Æ are typed as OE and AE, which is what the generator converts them to automatically.
No. Mots fléchés print their definitions inside the grid's dark cells with arrows pointing at each answer. These are mots croisés: a numbered grid with the clues listed beside it.
Yes. Set the puzzle language to French in the Crossword Generator, type in any theme words you want, and auto-fill will complete the rest of the grid from the French word database. You can then write clues, print it, export it as a .puz file, or publish it to this showcase.
Build one
Make your own French crossword
Set the puzzle language to French, type in the words your puzzle is about, and auto-fill completes the rest of the grid around them. Write the clues, then print it or publish it to this shelf.
The showcase is an open crossword community: anyone can construct. Make a puzzle with the generator (the solver does the heavy lifting of filling the grid), write your clues, and hit Publish. Set up an author profile and every puzzle you publish gets collected on your own page, ready to share.
Hi, I'm Tex and I made the crossword generator so that anyone can quickly make a fun themed NYTimes-style crossword puzzle. I've got some more cool projects that you can see back at texs.org! Feel free to email me or send me a DM:
