Turkish Crossword Puzzles

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

Turkish daily papers have run kare bulmaca for a long time, so unlike several of the other languages on this site, the layout below should need no introduction: numbers in the grid, clues under Soldan sağa and Yukarıdan aşağıya, and open lattices with longer entries rather than tightly packed blocks.

Turkish has twenty-nine letters, and the pair that matters most to a crossword is I and İ. These are genuinely different letters: dotless ı and dotted i are distinct vowels, and the distinction runs through the entire grammar, because every suffix in the language harmonises to the vowel before it. A grid that treated them as one letter would be misspelling half the language.

So each takes its own square and has to be typed as itself. That is easier than it sounds — typing a lowercase i gives you İ and a lowercase ı gives you I, exactly as Turkish capitalisation works. But it does mean ASK and AŞK are different answers, and that ISI (heat) and İŞİ are not interchangeable.

Ç, Ğ, Ö, Ş and Ü complete the alphabet, and Ğ has a property worth knowing at a crossing: it never begins a Turkish word. Q, W and X are the other side of that coin, appearing only in borrowings and names. Because Ğ, İ and Ş fall outside the single-byte encoding .puz uses, that export is switched off for Turkish; puzzles are shared as links and printed to PDF.

Auto-fill draws on about 1,224,000 Turkish entries — the largest list of any language on this site — and agglutination gives it a shape nothing else here matches. Where French peaks at seven letters and is nearly exhausted by fifteen, Turkish peaks at ten, with about 140,000 entries, and is still offering 55,000 at fifteen. Turkish builds a word by stacking suffixes onto a root, so the supply of long entries never runs out. It is the one language here where the long slots are easier to fill than the short ones.

That same property is why the raw list cannot be used as an answer pool: every stacked form is a word, and Turkish dictionaries dutifully document them, so ABANIYORUM arrives looking exactly as legitimate as ABAJUR. Narrowing the list to answers that trace back to a dictionary headword cuts it by 62%, the largest reduction of any language here, and what is left is the ordinary vocabulary these puzzles are filled from: MİKROSKOP, YÜKSEKLİK, TIRMANMAK, KARDEŞLİK.

The lattice layout follows from the same numbers. Turkish can fill a densely interlocked American-style grid at 11×11 and 13×13 — most languages on this site cannot fill one at any size — but it fails at 7×7 and 9×9, where the pool's thin three-letter end is exposed. A lattice spends its answers at five to nine letters, which is where Turkish is deepest.