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; English speakers call it an arrowword. It is dominant enough on the German market that “Kreuzworträtsel” often gets used loosely for it.

These puzzles are the stricter thing — a numbered grid, one number per entry, clues listed beside it under Waagerecht and Senkrecht. One habit worth unlearning: German arrowwords lean heavily on abbreviations and very short entries, and these grids have a three-letter floor, so 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 resolve it across two squares as AE, on the grounds that a grid should hold only the basic alphabet. The puzzles here take the first approach: Ä, Ö and Ü each occupy one square and are typed as themselves, so MÄRZ is four letters and not five.

The eszett is the one place where the resolution is universal, and this follows it: ß becomes SS, so STRASSE fills seven squares and GROSS five. German spelling prescribes the same thing when a capital is required, which is why it feels natural rather than like a compromise.

The practical upshot is that .puz export works. That format stores a single byte per square and predates Unicode — which is why it is switched off for Polish, Czech, Russian and Hebrew here — but Ä, Ö and Ü sit inside its encoding, so a German puzzle opens intact in Across Lite and other desktop solvers.

Auto-fill draws on about 452,000 German entries, and the list has a shape no other language here matches: it barely has a peak. Roughly 42,000 seven-letter entries, 44,000 at eight, 45,000 at nine and again at ten, 42,000 at eleven — and still nearly 18,000 at fifteen, where French is down to 2,800. Compounding is the reason: German builds a new long word wherever a phrase would do, so the supply never really thins out.

That is why these puzzles are open lattice grids rather than dense American-style ones. The layout spends its entries at the lengths German is richest in, and answers like WEIHNACHT, RENNPFERD, SANITÄTER and BLUTDRUCK come out of ordinary vocabulary instead of being reached for.