Greek Crossword Puzzles

A Greek crossword is a σταυρόλεξο. The newspaper kind usually numbers its rows and columns along the edges, and each clue under Οριζόντια (across) or Κάθετα (down) covers a whole row or column. The puzzles here put a number in the first square of each answer instead, the way the New York Times does, and every answer gets its own clue.

The grids are dense, so every letter belongs to both an across and a down answer. That is hard in Greek, a language of long words with very few of three letters. The short answers you will meet are the ones any 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).

Because there are so few, three-letter answers recur from puzzle to puzzle on this page, the way ERA and ONE recur in English papers. No longer answer is used twice.

Greek grids are written in capitals, and 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 a final ς becomes an ordinary Σ. The grid holds the 24 letters and nothing else.

The cost is that the accent no longer tells words apart. ΠΟΤΕ is both πότε (when) and ποτέ (never), and ΓΕΡΟΣ is both γέρος (an old man) and γερός (sturdy). More than 1,600 grid spellings stand for two words in this way. 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 of its letters crosses a different word. ΝΤ is especially common and turns up all over a Greek grid.

Ξ and Ψ work the other way round, writing two sounds in a single square. They appear often in verb forms such as ΓΡΑΨΩ and ΔΕΙΞΩ.