Indonesian Crossword Puzzles

Indonesian calls the crossword teka-teki silang, usually shortened to TTS, and it is a fixture of the newspaper and magazine racks. Unlike most of the languages on this site, there is no rival arrowword tradition to distinguish these puzzles from: the numbered grid with a clue list beside it is what a TTS normally looks like.

So these are what you would expect — numbers in the first square of each entry, clues listed under Mendatar and Menurun, a three-letter minimum. What is different is the size range: there are no 9×9 puzzles on this shelf, and their absence is not an oversight, for a reason genuinely specific to Indonesian.

Indonesian is the one language on this site where the alphabet section has nothing to warn you about. The orthography is the plain Latin twenty-six with no diacritics, no extra letters, and nothing that needs folding or converting on the way into a square. What you type is what goes in the grid, and since nothing leaves the basic Latin set, .puz export works.

One genuine limitation: reduplicated plurals like anak-anak and buku-buku are written with a hyphen, and a crossword square cannot hold one. They are absent from the word list rather than silently run together, so ANAKANAK will never appear as an answer.

Auto-fill draws on about 159,000 Indonesian entries — the most compact list on this site — and the way it is distributed matters more than its size. Indonesian builds vocabulary by wrapping a root in a circumfix, PER-…-AN, KE-…-AN, PE-…-AN, so the ordinary everyday noun for a thing tends to run eight to eleven letters. PELAKSANAAN, PEMAHAMAN, KEGAGALAN and KEAGAMAAN are not literary vocabulary; they are how you say quite plain things. The bare roots underneath are three and four letters, and a great many of them are grammatical particles rather than answerable words.

The consequence is the opposite of what most languages present. Long slots are easy here and short ones are scarce: the curated answer list holds 948 usable eight-letter answers and just 27 at three letters. Five puzzles consumed twenty-four of those twenty-seven, and the sixth would not fill at any size. That is also why the smallest grid here is 11×11 — a smaller lattice is a higher proportion of short entries, so the size every other language finds free is the one Indonesian cannot afford.