German Crossword Puzzles

The puzzle on the cover of a German Rätselheft is usually a Schwedenrätsel. The clues sit inside the dark squares, small arrows point at the answers, and there are no numbers and no clue list. Germans named it after Sweden, where the layout was popularised, and English speakers call it an arrowword. It is so common that people often call it a Kreuzworträtsel too.

The puzzles here are the stricter form: a numbered grid with the clues listed beside it under Waagerecht (across) and Senkrecht (down). Arrowwords lean heavily on abbreviations and very short entries. Every answer here has at least three letters, and the fill is ordinary vocabulary throughout.

German puzzles have never agreed on the umlauts. Some print Ä in a single square exactly as it is written. Others spell it out across two squares as AE, so that the grid holds only the basic alphabet. The puzzles here keep Ä, Ö and Ü whole and you type them as themselves, so MÄRZ is four letters, not five.

The eszett is the one case everyone agrees on. ß becomes SS, so STRASSE fills seven squares and GROSS five. German spelling does the same when a word is written in capitals, so it reads naturally.

Because Ä, Ö and Ü fit inside the old .puz file format, a German puzzle exports cleanly and opens in Across Lite and other desktop solvers. Polish, Czech, Russian and Hebrew puzzles cannot do that.

German builds a new long word wherever English would use a phrase. Blutdruck is blood pressure and Rennpferd is a racehorse. For a crossword this means long answers are never scarce, and a grid can use them freely.

The German word list here has about 452,000 entries, and unlike most languages it hardly thins out with length. There are about 45,000 words of nine letters and still nearly 18,000 of fifteen. French, at fifteen letters, is down to about 2,800. Answers like WEIHNACHT, RENNPFERD, SANITÄTER and BLUTDRUCK are everyday words, not rarities a setter has to hunt for.