This is the public shelf of the Crossword Generator, the fastest tool for making newspaper-style crosswords (you can literally make one in just a few seconds). And once you’ve built a puzzle you like, you can submit it to be published here for anyone to solve online. And you can also print any crossword puzzle here, complete with the clues. Pass them around on paper! Physical media!
The puzzles on this shelf were made and published by other people using the Crossword Generator tool on this site. Using this tool you can make NYTimes and Guardian-style crosswords as well as criss-cross style, and they're all free to solve. You don't need an account, and there's nothing to install.
Click any puzzle to solve it right in your browser. Your progress saves on your device, and you can reveal an entry from the clue list when you're stuck. Prefer pencil and paper? Every puzzle prints as a clean blank sheet with a separate answer key, and each printout carries a QR code back to its online version.
Format
Krzyżówka, and no hasło to send in
The krzyżówka in a Polish magazine usually comes with two things these puzzles do not have. The first is the panoramic layout — clues printed inside the shaded cells with arrows pointing at the answers, no numbering, no separate list. The second is the hasło: a phrase spelled out by the letters in specially marked squares, which is the actual object of the exercise and, historically, what you posted in to enter the draw.
What is here is the plainer thing. A numbered grid, clues listed beside it under Poziomo and Pionowo, one clue per entry, and no hidden phrase to assemble at the end — the puzzle is finished when the grid is. The layouts are open lattices rather than densely interlocked blocks, which turns out to be the only shape Polish reliably fills, for reasons in the word-list section below.
Alphabet
Ą, Ć, Ę, Ł, Ń, Ó, Ś, Ź and Ż are letters, and are kept
Polish has thirty-two letters, nine of them carrying a mark: the ogonek in Ą and Ę, the acute in Ć, Ń, Ó, Ś and Ź, the dot in Ż, and the stroke through Ł. Each is a letter of its own with its own place in the alphabet, and each takes its own square here and has to be typed as itself. MOŻE and MOZE are not the same string, and ŻONA is not ZONA.
Polish puzzles differ on this — plenty of printed krzyżówki drop the marks and let the solver supply them mentally — so you will need a Polish keyboard layout or the AltGr combinations to solve comfortably. The digraphs are uncontroversial by comparison: CH, CZ, DZ, DŹ, DŻ, RZ and SZ are combinations rather than letters in Polish, so they take two squares each.
One consequence: .puz export is switched off for Polish. That format stores a single byte per square and predates Unicode, and while Ó happens to fit, Ł, Ą, Ę, Ś, Ź and Ż do not. Polish puzzles are shared as links and printed to PDF instead, both of which keep the spelling intact.
Word list
Why a Polish grid cannot be packed tightly
Auto-fill draws on about 975,000 Polish entries, and on paper Polish looked like the best candidate here for dense American-style grids: 444 usable three-letter answers and 1,001 at four, roughly twice what French offers. It filled none of them — zero patterns out of four at 7×7, 9×9, 11×11 and 13×13 — while an open lattice filled every pattern tried in about a tenth of a second.
The reason is the marked letters. A Polish short answer is very likely to contain Ł, Ą, Ę, Ś or Ż, and one that does can only cross another answer carrying the same letter in the same position. In a tightly interlocked grid two of them meet almost immediately, and at that point there is nothing left to choose from. Having a lot of short words is not the same as having short words that can cross.
Questions
Polish crosswords, answered
Yes. Every puzzle on this page can be solved in the browser at no cost, and printed with a blank grid and a separate answer key.
No. Polish magazine krzyżówki often hide a phrase in marked squares, to be read out once the grid is full. These puzzles have no hidden phrase — filling the grid is the whole puzzle.
Yes. They are letters of the Polish alphabet, not decorated versions of A, E, L and Z, so each takes its own square and must be typed as itself — MOŻE and MOZE are different strings. A Polish keyboard layout or the AltGr combinations will make solving much easier.
No. The .puz format stores one byte per square and cannot represent Ł, Ą, Ę, Ś, Ź or Ż, so it is disabled for Polish. Printing to PDF and sharing the puzzle link both preserve the spelling correctly.
Yes. Set the puzzle language to Polish in the Crossword Generator, type in any theme words you want, and auto-fill will complete the rest of the grid from the Polish word database. You can then write clues, print it, or publish it to this showcase.
Build one
Make your own Polish crossword
Set the puzzle language to Polish, type in the words your puzzle is about, and auto-fill completes the rest of the grid around them. Write the clues, then print it or publish it to this shelf.
The showcase is an open crossword community: anyone can construct. Make a puzzle with the generator (the solver does the heavy lifting of filling the grid), write your clues, and hit Publish. Set up an author profile and every puzzle you publish gets collected on your own page, ready to share.
Hi, I'm Tex and I made the crossword generator so that anyone can quickly make a fun themed NYTimes-style crossword puzzle. I've got some more cool projects that you can see back at texs.org! Feel free to email me or send me a DM:
