Indonesian Crossword Puzzles

Indonesian calls the crossword teka-teki silang, usually shortened to TTS, and it is a fixture of newspapers and magazine racks. Many languages have a rival arrowword format, but Indonesian does not. The numbered grid with a clue list beside it is simply what a TTS looks like.

So these puzzles look as you would expect. A number sits in the first square of each answer, the clues are listed under Mendatar (across) and Menurun (down), and no answer is shorter than three letters.

Indonesian is written in the plain Latin alphabet of twenty-six letters, with no diacritics and no extra letters. Nothing needs folding or converting on the way into a square. What you type is exactly what goes in the grid, and puzzles export to .puz for standard crossword apps.

Reduplicated plurals such as anak-anak and buku-buku are the one catch. They are written with a hyphen, and a crossword square cannot hold one. Running the halves together would spell something that is not a word, so ANAKANAK never appears as an answer.

Indonesian builds vocabulary by wrapping a root in a circumfix such as PER-…-AN, KE-…-AN or PE-…-AN. The everyday noun for a thing therefore tends to run eight to eleven letters. PELAKSANAAN (implementation), PEMAHAMAN (understanding), KEGAGALAN (failure) and KEAGAMAAN (religious affairs) are not literary words. They are how people say quite plain things.

The roots underneath are three and four letters long, and many of the short words are grammatical particles that make poor answers. The Indonesian word list behind the generator is also the most compact on this site, at about 159,000 entries. In an Indonesian grid the long slots are easy and the short ones are scarce, the opposite of most languages. A small grid has a higher share of short answers, so the smallest puzzles here are 11×11.