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
Crucigrama, not autodefinido
Spanish-language newsstands, in Spain and across Latin America, mostly sell autodefinidos: definitions printed inside the shaded cells, arrows pointing at the answers, no clue list and no numbering. English calls that an arrowword. If it is what you had in mind, this is not it.
These are crucigramas in the older sense — a numbered grid with the clues beside it under Horizontales and Verticales. They run smaller and tighter than most languages here: several below are 7×7 and 9×9 American-style layouts where every letter belongs to two answers at once, a demanding shape to fill, and Spanish is one of the few languages here that can.
Alphabet
Ñ has its own square; the accents come off
Ñ is a full letter, not a decorated N, and behaves like one here: it takes its own square and has to be typed as itself. AÑO is three letters, and ANO is a different word.
The accents are the opposite case. Á, É, Í, Ó and Ú go in as A, E, I, O and U, and Ü goes in as U, so ACCIÓN is gridded ACCION and PINGÜINO is PINGUINO. That is what Spanish crosswords have always done, and it means you never have to work out whether a square wants the accent.
CH and LL take two squares each. Both were alphabetized as single letters until 1994 and were formally dropped from the alphabet in 2010, which is why older puzzles sometimes gave CH a square of its own; these grids follow the modern rule.
Word list
A dictionary of headwords, not of verb forms
Auto-fill draws on about 122,000 Spanish entries — the most compact list on this site, because it is built from dictionary headwords rather than from every inflected form in a corpus. A single Spanish verb has more than forty written forms, and including them all would make the list several times larger and the puzzles considerably worse.
What that buys is fill that reads like vocabulary: SERVICIOS, ANIMACIÓN, CANDIDATO, SINDICATO, CONCIERTO, rather than the CANTARA and ÉRAMOS a frequency-ranked corpus leaves behind. The list is thickest at eight letters, around 18,000 entries, and stays useful down to three and four, which is what makes the tightly interlocked small grids possible. It helps that Spanish words almost always end in a vowel or in S, so the last square of an Across rarely breaks a Down.
.puz export works for Spanish: Ñ is the only letter outside the basic Latin set, and it fits the old single-byte encoding the format uses. Puzzles open in Across Lite and the usual desktop solvers, and print to PDF with a separate answer key.
Questions
Spanish 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. An autodefinido prints its definitions inside the shaded cells with arrows pointing at each answer, and has no clue list. These are crucigramas: a numbered grid with the clues listed beside it under Horizontales and Verticales.
No. Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú and Ü all go into the grid as plain vowels, so ACCIÓN is entered ACCION. Ñ is different — it is a letter of its own, takes its own square, and must be typed as Ñ.
Two. CH and LL were alphabetized as single letters in Spanish until 1994 and were formally dropped from the alphabet in 2010, so these grids treat them as the two letters they now are.
Yes. Set the puzzle language to Spanish in the Crossword Generator, type in any theme words you want, and auto-fill will complete the rest of the grid from the Spanish word database. You can then write clues, print it, export it as a .puz file, or publish it to this showcase.
Build one
Make your own Spanish crossword
Set the puzzle language to Spanish, 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:
