Russian Crossword Puzzles

A Russian кроссворд is the numbered grid with a list of clues beside it, the same kind of puzzle an English solver knows. The clues are headed По горизонтали (across) and По вертикали (down), with one clue for each answer.

Russian crosswords have a strong habit about answers: they are almost always nouns, in the nominative singular. The puzzles here are looser. Verbs and adjectives appear as well, always in their dictionary forms, so if you learned on newspaper кроссворды the range of possible answers 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 the standard convention in Russian crosswords and in ordinary Russian print, so ЁЖ (hedgehog) is entered ЕЖ and a Russian reader barely notices.

Ъ, Ь and Ы are full letters and take their own squares. None of the three can begin a word, so they only ever appear partway along an answer. A down answer can never start in a square where an across answer has put Ь, a limit an English grid never runs into.

Russian words are also long on average, and the language has fewer three- and four-letter nouns than a tightly interlocked grid needs. Most Russian puzzles here are therefore open grids, where each answer is crossed at intervals rather than at every letter, and long words such as КОСМОНАВТ and ЛЕЧЕБНИЦА carry much of the grid.

Russian has separate names for puzzles English would call crosswords. A сканворд prints its clues inside shaded squares in the grid itself, with arrows pointing to the answers, and has no clue list at all. It is the puzzle that fills most of the Russian puzzle press.

A японский кроссворд (Japanese crossword) is not a word puzzle. It is a nonogram: numbers along the edges tell you which squares to shade, and the shaded squares reveal a picture. The puzzles on this page are кроссворды in the strict sense.