Criss-Cross Puzzle Maker

What you get

One sheet with a name and date line, an empty numbered grid, and the word list underneath in four alphabetical columns headed Fit these words into the grid. Only the squares a word passes through are drawn; everything else stays white paper rather than black crossword blocks.

Pick a theme and the words are chosen for you, or paste your own list. Nothing you type is uploaded; the grid is worked out in your browser and the words never leave it.

A list typed for the word search can be pasted straight in, within tighter limits: four to twenty words of three to eighteen letters, where the word search takes up to twenty-five. Words outside that length are named in a warning and skipped, and a pasted list longer than twenty is cut to its first twenty.

How a criss-cross differs from a crossword

A crossword gives you clues and hides the answers. A criss-cross gives you the answers and hides where they go. You are handed the whole word list and the puzzle is working out which word fits which run of squares, using the lengths and the letters that cross.

That makes it a different kind of thinking, and an easier one to start. There is no general knowledge involved and nothing to look up, so a child who cannot yet do a crossword can usually do a criss-cross of the same words. It also means a puzzle can be built from any list of four to twenty words, including one that has nothing in common but the topic you are teaching this week.

Only across and down, never backwards or diagonal. That is not a difficulty setting, it is what a crossword grid is.

When it is the meanings you want checked rather than the spelling, the crossword maker on this site builds the same kind of grid from the same engine and prints a clue for each answer in place of the list. It takes one word and one clue per line, or two columns pasted from a spreadsheet.

Choosing words that fit together

A criss-cross is built on shared letters, so the list matters more here than in a word search. Words that have letters in common interlock readily; a list where every word begins and ends differently and shares almost nothing will leave some words with nowhere to attach.

Vowel-heavy words are the reliable connectors. E, A and O turn up everywhere, and a long word carrying several of them gives everything else something to hang from. That is also why the longest word is placed first: it offers the most letters for the rest of the list to reach.

Short words are the ones most often left out, which surprises people who expect the opposite. Building twenty-word puzzles from the site’s 36 theme lists, fewer than one three-letter word in ten found no place, while every nine-letter word was placed: three letters give three chances to cross, nine give nine.

When a word cannot be linked to anything else, a warning among the settings names it, and it is left out of the printed word list as well as the grid, so the sheet never asks anyone to place a word that has no squares. Pressing New puzzle, or Fit them again for a typed list, rearranges everything and often finds a home for it.

Using it after a word search

The same spelling list works in both tools, and the order is worth getting right. A word search lets you match letters you can already see on the page. A criss-cross does not: the squares are empty, so each word has to be written out letter by letter and then tested against the letters where it crosses.

Running the search first and the criss-cross a few days later is a genuine step up rather than the same exercise twice. Nothing needs retyping between them.

For a class, the numbered grid gives you something a word search cannot: a way to talk about the puzzle out loud. "Seven down" names a square everyone can find, which makes it workable on a board with the whole room joining in.