Greek Crossword Puzzles

These are fully checked grids in the style of the New York Times: every letter belongs to an Across and a Down answer, a number sits in the first square of each answer, and the clues come in two lists. A Greek newspaper σταυρόλεξο usually numbers its rows and columns along the edges instead and lists its clues under Οριζόντια and Κάθετα, but the dense grid itself is the same kind.

The hard part of a dense grid in Greek is its short answers, and Greek has very few. The Modern Greek word list behind these puzzles peaks at ten letters, with 35,321 entries, and still holds 5,271 at fifteen; at three letters it has 464, and the spelling dictionary it was checked against lists only 482 three-letter forms of any kind. Fully checked grids spend a quarter of their answers at three letters, so the ones in these puzzles are what a Greek setter reaches for: articles and pronouns (ΤΗΝ, ΤΩΝ, ΣΑΣ), subjunctive verbs after να (ΒΡΩ, ΠΙΩ, ΦΑΣ), accusatives (ΝΑΟ, ΛΑΟ, ΟΔΟ) and a few loans (ΣΕΤ, ΣΚΙ, ΡΟΚ). The dictionary files most of those only as case-table rows, so 81 of them were read and admitted by hand, which took the pool from 142 three-letter answers to 220.

Even 220 is too few for ten dense grids that never repeat an answer. The two 15×15s and two 13×13s were built first, from the most frequent 15% of the vocabulary, and used about a hundred of them; the first 11×11 after that could not be filled at any frequency. So on this shelf, and only this one, three-letter answers may recur, the way ERA and ONE recur in English papers every day. Across the ten puzzles there are 127 different three-letter answers and none appears in more than four of them. No answer of four letters or more is used twice.

Greek grids are written in capitals, and Greek capitals in a crossword carry no accents: the tonos and the dialytika both come off, so αγάπη is entered as ΑΓΑΠΗ and προϊόν as ΠΡΟΙΟΝ, and the final ς becomes an ordinary Σ. The alphabet in the grid is the 24 letters and nothing else. The price is that the tonos stops telling words apart. In the word list 1,616 grid spellings stand for two words that the accent separates in print: ΠΟΤΕ is both πότε (when) and ποτέ (never), ΓΕΡΟΣ both γέρος (an old man) and γερός (sturdy), ΑΓΙΑ both άγια (holy things) and αγία (a saint). The clue decides which one is meant, and the crossings confirm it.

Modern Greek has no single letters for the sounds b, d and g at the start of a word, and writes them as pairs: ΜΠ in ΜΠΑΛΑ, ΝΤ in ΝΤΟΜΑΤΑ, ΓΚ in ΓΚΟΛ. Each pair takes two squares, and each letter in it crosses a different word, so ΝΤ turns up in 18,026 entries in the list, ΜΠ in 6,421 and ΓΚ in 3,987. At the other end are Ξ and Ψ, which each write two sounds in one square: they appear in 18,134 and 6,919 entries, a large share of them verb forms like ΓΡΑΨΩ and ΔΕΙΞΩ.

Greek is outside the one-byte Latin encoding the .puz format uses, so .puz export is switched off for Greek puzzles. Printing to PDF and sharing the puzzle link both work.

Most spelling dictionaries store a stem and the endings it can take. The Greek one used here lists every form in full, 812,160 of them after the accents come off, and most are conjugations nobody writes. Every other language on the site combines its dictionary with a list of words people actually use. Doing that for Greek would have produced a million entries, so here it works the other way round: a dictionary form is kept only if it also appears in film subtitles, Greek news or Greek Wikipedia. That leaves 240,441 entries, each spelled correctly and each found in real text, ranked by how often they appear across the three sources together.

The clues start from the Greek Wiktionary, which defines 143,000 of those words. More than half of its rows are grammar tables, such as 'γενική ενικού του ναός' (genitive singular of 'temple') or 'β' πληθυντικό υποτακτικής αορίστου', and those were removed before any grid was filled. What remains are definitions. Another 1,022 clues were written from scratch, in Greek, for common words the Greek Wiktionary had never defined, using the English Wiktionary's Greek entries as a guide rather than translating them.