Norwegian Crossword Puzzles

Norwegian is one spoken language with two official written forms. Bokmål is what most Norwegians write and nearly everything printed in Oslo is set in; Nynorsk, built in the nineteenth century from the rural dialects, is the first language of roughly one schoolchild in eight and of a good part of the west coast. Every Norwegian learns to read both, and public bodies have to answer letters in whichever one they arrive in. But a crossword has to pick, because the two spell the same words differently — Bokmål has ikke, Nynorsk has ikkje; one writes hva, the other kva — and a grid cannot hold both.

So this shelf is Bokmål throughout. The dictionary behind it covers both standards, and before any grid was filled every headword with only a Nynorsk entry was set aside: 6,865 of them, words such as aleine, bikkja and detta that a Bokmål reader would mark as misspellings. If you write Nynorsk yourself you will still find these puzzles perfectly readable, in the way a Nynorsk newspaper is readable to everyone else. They just will not accept your spellings.

Norwegian writes with 29 letters, the Latin 26 and then Æ, Ø and Å in that order, sharing its alphabet with Danish rather than with Swedish, which ends Å, Ä, Ö. Each of the three takes its own square and has to be typed as itself. Only one of them has a look-alike to trip over: Å sits over A, and the answer pool for these puzzles holds 38 pairs that differ by nothing else — FAR is a father and FÅR is sheep, HAR is “have” and HÅR is hair, MALE is to paint and MÅLE is to measure, GATE is a street and GÅTE is a riddle. Æ and Ø have no plain twin, so nothing in the grid is ever a mistyped E or O.

The other thing to know is where Norwegian keeps its definite article: on the end of the noun. HUS is “house”, HUSET is “the house”, HUSENE is “the houses”. Those are three different strings of different lengths, and a dictionary that lists every one of them as an entry — English Wiktionary does, some 67,000 inflected headwords against 33,000 base forms — will happily fill a grid with definite plurals. The answers here were cut back to the base forms, so what you write in is hus, not huset, the way the word appears at the head of a dictionary entry.

Because Æ, Ø and Å all sit inside the old one-byte Latin-1 encoding, .puz export works for Norwegian: a puzzle survives the round trip and opens in Across Lite, which is not true of Romanian, Polish or anything in Cyrillic.

Auto-fill draws on about 633,000 Norwegian entries, and its shape is unusual even by Scandinavian standards. Norwegian compounds freely — barnehage, kjøleskap, fjellvann, midnattssol — and writes each compound as a single word, so the list is thickest not at six or seven letters, where English peaks, but at ten, with almost 67,000 entries, and it is still offering nearly 31,000 at fifteen. Swedish, built the same way, peaks two letters earlier.

That shape decides the grids. In test fills the dense American-style pattern could not be completed at all at 7×7 or 9×9 from a pool of common words, while the open lattice layout filled every 13×13 and 15×15 tried in a tenth of a second. A lattice spends most of its entries at five to nine letters, exactly where the Norwegian vocabulary is deepest, so the puzzles below are lattice grids and the fill comes out as ordinary words — SJOKOLADE, KARANTENE, BARNELEGE — rather than the three-letter scraps a tighter grid would force.