Norwegian Crossword Puzzles

A Norwegian crossword, a kryssord, works like an English one: numbered squares, one letter in each, and the clues listed beside the grid. The puzzles here are written in Bokmål, the more widely used of Norway's two written standards, and every answer is a base form, the way the word appears at the head of a dictionary entry.

Norwegian writes its compounds as a single word: barnehage, kjøleskap, fjellvann, midnattssol. That makes it unusually rich in long words. The Norwegian word list behind these puzzles is thickest at ten letters, where English peaks at six or seven, and it still holds nearly 31,000 entries at fifteen. Swedish, built the same way, peaks two letters earlier.

Most of the grids below are open lattices, the British shape, which spend their entries at five to nine letters. The answers come out as whole everyday words such as SJOKOLADE, KARANTENE and BARNELEGE. There is one dense American-style 15×15 on the shelf as well.

Norwegian has 29 letters: the Latin 26, then Æ, Ø and Å in that order. It shares that alphabet with Danish, while Swedish ends Å, Ä, Ö. Each of the three takes its own square and has to be typed as itself.

Only Å has a look-alike to trip over. The answers for these puzzles include 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.

Norwegian also keeps its definite article on the end of the noun. HUS is "house", HUSET "the house" and HUSENE "the houses", three words of three different lengths. The answers here always use the base form, so you write hus, not huset.

Norwegian is one spoken language with two official written forms. Bokmål is what most Norwegians write and what nearly everything printed in Oslo uses. Nynorsk, built in the nineteenth century from the rural dialects, is the first written 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 must answer letters in whichever one they arrive in.

A crossword has to pick one, because the two spell the same words differently. Bokmål has ikke and hva where Nynorsk has ikkje and kva, and a square holds only one letter. Every answer and clue here follows Bokmål, and words that exist only in Nynorsk, such as aleine, bikkja and detta, were left out. A Nynorsk writer will find the puzzles easy to read. They just won't accept Nynorsk spellings.