Portuguese Crossword Puzzles

If you have solved palavras cruzadas from a Brazilian banca — the Coquetel books, most obviously — the puzzle you know prints its definitions inside the shaded squares, with arrows pointing at each answer, and has no clue list and no numbers. That layout is standard enough in Brazil that many solvers have never seen another one.

These are the other kind: a numbered grid with the clues set out beside it under Horizontais and Verticais. The shelf mixes two grid shapes — tight American-style layouts where every square is crossed by two answers, and open lattices with longer entries and unchecked squares between them. Portuguese fills both, which is not true of most languages here.

A Portuguese grid holds the plain twenty-six letters, and every diacritic is dropped as the word goes in: Á, Â, Ã, À, É, Ê, Í, Ó, Ô, Õ and Ú all become bare vowels, and Ç becomes C. So AÇÃO is gridded ACAO, CORAÇÃO is CORACAO, and PÊSSEGO is PESSEGO. Portuguese crosswords have always worked this way, and it saves the solver from deciding whether a square wants Ó or Ô.

K, W and Y are in the alphabet — formally readmitted by the 1990 Orthographic Agreement, in force in Brazil and Portugal since 2009 — but they turn up almost only in loanwords and names, so they are rare letters to build a crossing on. Nothing survives the fold that is outside the basic Latin set, which means .puz export works and these puzzles open in Across Lite and other desktop solvers.

Auto-fill draws on about 675,000 Portuguese entries, built from Brazilian and European dictionaries together, so both national spellings are in it and both are valid fill: ATO sits beside ACTO, FATO beside FACTO, ÓTIMO beside ÓPTIMO. What is not symmetric is the frequency ranking behind them, which comes from a Brazilian corpus — where the two spellings compete, auto-fill reaches for the Brazilian one first, and a Portuguese solver will notice the register leans Brazilian.

The list is thickest at eight letters, with about 98,000 entries, and stays deep through the middle lengths where a grid spends most of its squares. The long answers on this shelf — CANDIDATO, GELADEIRA, MOLECULAR, ARREPIADO, CONGELADO — come out of that band, rather than out of the dozens of conjugated forms a Portuguese verb throws off.