Turkish Crossword Puzzles

Turkish keeps its two puzzle types apart by name. A kare bulmaca is a numbered square grid with the clues listed beside it, and that is the format on this page. A çengel bulmaca prints its clues inside the grid's dark cells, hooked to the answers by arrows, and has no numbering at all.

Turkish daily papers have run kare bulmaca for a long time, so the layout needs no introduction. Numbers sit in the grid, and the clues are listed under Soldan sağa (across) and Yukarıdan aşağıya (down).

Turkish has twenty-nine letters, and the pair that matters most in a crossword is I and İ. Dotless ı and dotted i are separate vowels, and the difference runs through the whole grammar, because every suffix harmonises with the vowel before it. So each takes its own square.

Typing them is easier than it sounds. A lowercase i gives you İ and a lowercase ı gives you I, which is how Turkish capitalisation already works. It does mean that ASK and AŞK are different answers, and so are ISI (heat) and İŞİ.

Ç, Ğ, Ö, Ş and Ü complete the alphabet. Ğ is handy at a crossing because it never begins a Turkish word. Q, W and X are not Turkish letters and turn up only in borrowings and names.

Turkish makes words by stacking suffixes onto a root, and dictionaries record the results. The Turkish word list behind the generator has about 1.2 million entries, the largest of any language on this site. Most languages run short of words as the length goes up. Turkish has more ten-letter entries than any other length and still about 55,000 at fifteen letters.

Plenty of those are inflected forms such as ABANIYORUM (I am leaning on it), which looks just as much like a word as ABAJUR (lampshade). The answers in these puzzles stick to plain dictionary vocabulary: MİKROSKOP, YÜKSEKLİK, TIRMANMAK, KARDEŞLİK.