Portuguese Crossword Puzzles

If you have solved palavras cruzadas from a Brazilian newsstand, most likely a Coquetel book, the puzzle you know prints its definitions inside the shaded squares, with arrows pointing at each answer. It has no numbers and no clue list. That layout is so common in Brazil that many solvers have never seen another one.

These are the other kind: a numbered grid with the clues listed beside it under Horizontais and Verticais. Some grids are tight American-style layouts where every square belongs to two answers. Others are open lattices with longer answers and unchecked squares between them.

A Portuguese grid holds the plain twenty-six letters, and every diacritic is dropped. Á, Â, Ã, À, É, Ê, Í, Ó, Ô, Õ and Ú all become plain vowels, and Ç becomes C. So AÇÃO is entered 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 were formally readmitted to the alphabet by the 1990 Orthographic Agreement, in force since 2009. They still turn up almost only in loanwords and names, so they are rare at a crossing. Because nothing falls outside A to Z, Portuguese puzzles export to .puz and open in Across Lite and other desktop solvers.

Brazilian and European Portuguese still spell some words differently, and both spellings are valid answers here: ATO beside ACTO, FATO beside FACTO, ÓTIMO beside ÓPTIMO, DIRETOR beside DIRECTOR. In each pair the European form keeps a consonant the Brazilian one dropped. Where the two compete, the grids lean Brazilian, and a solver in Portugal will notice.

The long answers are everyday words such as CANDIDATO, GELADEIRA, MOLECULAR and ARREPIADO. A Portuguese verb has dozens of written forms, but conjugations like IREMOS and ÉRAMOS are kept out of the answers.