Korean Crossword Puzzles

A Korean crossword, 가로세로 낱말퀴즈 ("across-down word quiz"), puts a whole Hangul syllable block in each square, never the individual letters it is built from. 농사 (farming) takes two squares, 망원경 (telescope) three, 설상가상 four. Across clues are 가로 열쇠 and down clues 세로 열쇠, the "keys" to each direction.

Answers are short by English standards. Of the 256 answers in the ten puzzles here, 98 are two syllables and 95 are three; only 18 run to five or six. They are nearly all nouns: everyday words, compounds such as 해안경비대 (coast guard), and the four-character idioms, 사자성어, that Korean puzzles love. 설상가상 ("frost on top of snow", one misfortune after another), 어불성설 (nonsense) and 십중팔구 (nine times out of ten) are all on this shelf.

The grids look like a Guardian puzzle more than an American one. Black squares take up about 38% of the board, there is no symmetry, and many squares belong to a single answer rather than two. That is not a style choice. The next section explains why a Korean grid has to be built that way.

Two answers can cross only where they share a square, so in Korean they have to share a whole syllable. English has 26 letters to match on. The Korean answers on this site use 997 different syllable blocks, and the everyday character set, KS X 1001, encodes 2,350 of the 11,172 that Hangul can form.

The difference is large. Pick two random answers from the English list here and they share at least one letter 79% of the time. Pick two from the Korean list and they share a syllable 2.6% of the time. A dense American grid, where every square is checked by two answers, needs that coincidence in every square, and the site's own grid filler has never completed one in Korean.

So these grids are grown from the words rather than poured into a pattern. The builder starts from one long answer and keeps adding answers that cross a syllable already on the board. Two syllables may only touch side by side when the pair they form is itself a word, which then becomes an answer. Each puzzle is the best of three hundred boards grown that way.

It is tempting to treat East Asian crosswords as one tradition. They share the idea of one sound or character per square instead of one letter, and not much else, because the scripts are so different in size.

Japanese crosswords (クロスワード) are written in kana, a syllabary of about 46 basic signs. A small ッ or ャ counts as its full-size form, while ガ and カ stay different letters. With so few signs, Japanese words cross each other freely. Japanese puzzles therefore follow strict grid rules, set out by the puzzle publisher Nikoli: no two black squares side by side, and black squares may never cut the grid into pieces. Japan's first crosswords ran in Sunday Mainichi in March 1925.

Chinese crosswords (填字游戏) put one character in each square. A character is a word or part of one, so a crossing in Chinese shares meaning as well as a sound. That is why four-character idioms, 成语, are the staple answer. With thousands of characters in use, Chinese grids are sparse like Korean ones, and symmetry is rarely attempted.