Ukrainian Crossword Puzzles

A Ukrainian кросворд is a numbered grid with the clues listed beside it under По горизонталі (across) and По вертикалі (down), one clue for each answer. That is the same kind of puzzle an English solver knows, and the clues are written the way a Ukrainian paper writes them: a short definition or a synonym, with the odd fill-in-the-blank from a song or a saying.

Three of the puzzles here are dense, in the New York Times style, where every letter belongs to both an across and a down answer. The rest are open grids, where answers cross at intervals. The reason is the short words. A dense grid's corners are blocks of three-letter answers crossing each other, which needs words that begin or end with a vowel, and most everyday Ukrainian three-letter words are consonant at both ends: ДІМ, ЛІС, СІК, РІК. Open grids give the longer words room instead.

The grid uses the thirty-three letters of the Ukrainian alphabet. Four of them set it apart from Russian at a glance: Ґ (a hard G, as in ҐАНОК, porch), Є, І and Ї. Russian's Ё, Ъ, Ы and Э do not appear at all. Ї is always pronounced "yi" and never loses its dots, so ЇЖА (food) and ІЖА are not the same answer.

Ukrainian writes an apostrophe where Russian would use a hard sign, as in м'ясо (meat) and сім'я (family). The apostrophe is not a letter and takes no square, so those answers go in as МЯСО and СІМЯ. Ь is a full letter with its own square, though no answer begins with one.

Ukrainian nouns have seven cases, including a vocative used for addressing someone, and verbs change for person and tense. Most answers here are dictionary forms: nominative nouns and infinitive verbs such as ЧИТАТИ.

The short answers are sometimes other forms, because a grid needs them: a plural such as ДНІ (days), a present-tense verb such as ІДЕ (goes), or an imperative such as СПИ (sleep!). The clue is always in the same form as its answer, so a clue in the plural asks for a plural.