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Criss-cross puzzle maker

Paste a word list. The words interlock where their letters agree, and you get an empty numbered grid to print with the word list beside it.

How to use it

1. Paste your words — one per line, or separated by spaces or commas. Three at the very least; eight to fifteen makes the best-looking grid.
2. Choose how many starting letters to give away. One is the usual kindness: it fills in the first letter of the longest word, which is enough to get somebody moving without giving the grid away.
3. Print it. The word list prints beside the grid, and the filled-in answers print on their own page unless you say otherwise.

The puzzle updates as you type. There is no Generate button — the words are interlocked in your browser.

What a criss-cross is, and what it is not

A criss-cross — also called a word fit or a fill-in — gives you the words and hides where they go. The grid is empty and numbered, the word list sits beside it grouped by length, and you work out which word fits where from the lengths and from the letters where words cross. It is the puzzle that most people actually mean when they go looking for a "crossword maker", and it is the one that works with your own word list.

It is not a crossword. A crossword hides the words and gives you clues instead, in a dense, symmetric grid where nearly every letter belongs to two words at once. Building one means a program that can fill an arbitrary grid pattern from a dictionary of a hundred thousand entries, and then a human writing a clue for every single entry. We have not built that, and a page that called itself a crossword maker and handed you this would be wasting your time. This is the honest name for what this is.

The good news is that for the job most people have — a topic's key words, a spelling list, the names of everyone in the team — the criss-cross is the better puzzle anyway. A crossword built from an arbitrary word list is usually a bad crossword.

Making a grid that comes out well

Words need letters in common

This is the whole mechanism. Words interlock where their letters agree, so a list that shares plenty of common letters — E, A, R, S, T — produces a tight, satisfying grid. A word with no letter in common with anything else on the list has nowhere to cross and is left out, and the page tells you which ones and why.

Mix the lengths

A list where every word is six letters long is the hardest kind to solve and the hardest to lay out, because the lengths stop being a clue. A spread from four letters to ten gives the solver something to reason with and gives the generator room to work.

Eight to fifteen words

Below about six the grid is a cross rather than a puzzle. Above about fifteen it gets large enough that it stops fitting comfortably on one sheet, and the solver spends longer scanning than thinking.

Two-word entries do not work

A grid square holds one letter and there is no square for a space, so a two-word entry is split into its two words. If you need NEW YORK as one entry, this is not the puzzle for it.

Printing it

The answers print on their own page by default — a filled-in grid printed beside an empty one is not an answer key, it is the answer.

The unused squares are blank paper. Most of a criss-cross grid is unused, and a generator that prints those squares as solid black will empty a home printer's cartridge on a single sheet. Here the grid is outlined squares on white, which also photocopies far better.

Large print makes the squares and the word list genuinely bigger. It matters here because the solver has to write a letter in every square by hand, and a square that is only big enough for a printed letter is not big enough for a written one.

Common questions

Why was one of my words left out?

Because it could not cross anything. Every word after the first has to share a letter with a word already in the grid, in a place where it will fit without accidentally spelling something else down the column beside it. The page names every word it could not place and says why, rather than quietly printing a word list with a word in it that is not in the grid.

Could the grid accidentally contain a word that is not on my list?

No, and this is checked rather than hoped for. Words are only ever placed where a new letter touches nothing sideways, so no unintended run of letters can form — and the answer key is then read back off the finished grid rather than off what the placer was told to do, so every run of two or more letters in the grid is on the word list and every word on the list is in the grid.

Will the same list always give the same grid?

Yes, as long as the settings match. The layout is built from your words rather than from a random number that changes every second, so you can rebuild a sheet you have lost.

Can I write my own clues instead of showing the words?

Not on this page. That would make it a crossword, and a crossword needs a clue for every entry written by a person — which is real work, and is the part a generator cannot do for you. If that is what you need, write the clues yourself against the numbered answer key this page prints.

Is anything I type sent to a server?

No. The grid is built in your browser and stays there. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged, and the page keeps working with your network disconnected once it has loaded.

Is it free?

Yes, with no account, no limit and no catch.

More printable puzzles

The word search generator takes the same kind of word list and hides the words in a letter grid instead. There is a daily mini crossword with real clues if that is what you came for, and a printable pack of the whole day's puzzles.