Russian Crossword Puzzles

Russian has separate names for what English lumps together. A кроссворд is the numbered grid with a clue list, which is what these are. A сканворд prints its clues inside the shaded cells with arrows pointing at the answers, and it is what fills most of the puzzle press. And a японский кроссворд is not a word puzzle at all — it is a nonogram, where numbers along the edges tell you which squares to shade to reveal a picture.

These are кроссворды in the strict sense, with the clues listed beside the grid under По горизонтали and По вертикали. One convention is worth flagging, because it is genuinely different: Russian crosswords have traditionally answered almost exclusively in nouns, in the nominative singular. These are not that strict — verbs and adjectives do appear, in their dictionary forms — so if you learned on newspaper кроссворды, the answer space here is wider than you are used to.

The grid holds the Cyrillic alphabet as written, with one substitution: Ё goes in as Е. That is not a technical compromise but the standard convention, in crosswords and in ordinary Russian typography alike — ЁЖ is gridded ЕЖ, and a solver reads it correctly without thinking about it.

Ъ, Ь and Ы are full letters and take their own squares, which is worth knowing because they behave unlike anything in a Latin-alphabet grid: none of the three can begin a word, so they only ever appear part-way along an entry. A Down entry starting at a square an Across has already filled with Ь is simply impossible, which constrains a Russian grid in a way an English constructor never has to think about. Cyrillic also sits well outside the single-byte encoding .puz uses, so that export is switched off; puzzles are shared as links and printed to PDF.

Auto-fill draws on about 671,000 Russian entries, and Russian is nonetheless one of the harder languages here to pack into a grid. The reason is at the short end: Russian words are long on average, and the language is poor in the three- and four-letter nouns a densely interlocked crossword lives on. The generator knows this — Russian defaults to a sparser grid with fewer crossings, and the puzzles on this shelf are open lattices where each answer is checked at intervals rather than at every letter.

The list is thickest at eight letters, with about 93,000 entries, which is where a lattice spends most of its squares: БАТАРЕЙКА, КОСМОНАВТ, РЕДАКТУРА and ЛЕЧЕБНИЦА all come out of that band.