Create crossword puzzle

To create a crossword puzzle, you need to have at least two words since the words need to be 'crossed'. From that point on you can create more intersections between words and expand your puzzle grid. Luckily, the crossword algorithm does all that hard thinking for us! :)

Adding words revolved around a theme is a very logical and a nice choice to make sure your words cross in context as well as visually :)

A nice way to give your crossword puzzle another dimension is to add a 'hidden solution'

The hidden solution can be anything you like and is marked in the field as cells with a specific background color. The characters of the hidden solution need to be collected by the user by filling in correct answers across the crossword puzzle field.

This can be used for competitions like selecting prize winners, but of course just having another small puzzle within a puzzle and enjoying the fun is reason enough :).

Checking answers is no longer required! The system does this automatically for you and shows the crossword puzzle player whenever their given answer is correct.

If you do not like this feature, there is the Premium option to 'Disable answer control' as well.

And lastly, Premium allows you to 'Reload given answers' automatically. This way puzzle players can finish their puzzle in multiple sessions if needed.

To give yourself an easy way to help other puzzle players, you can enable the 'Answer key' mode on your puzzle owner panel.

This is only available to you and can be turned on/off via the 'Eye'-icon at the top-right of your puzzle preview.

Both the blank version and the answer key version are available for printing as well.

Besides adding pure text crosswords, you can use your media files as well to make different kinds of crossword puzzles.

Images are a nice way to give hints/descriptions as well and allows different kinds of questions since you now have an image to hint the puzzle player towards the answer.

This can activated via the Premium 'Type of crossword' option, and choose 'Image' there.

To make the puzzles a bit easier, you can now also add in the Premium 'Word Bank' option. This allows the crossword puzzle player to select an answer from all of the answers within the puzzle.

The word bank pops up once a player select a cell within the crossword puzzle grid, since at that point the puzzle understands where the user would like to insert the selected answer.

The crossword puzzle maker allows all kinds of cool Premium custom styling options which give the puzzle any look you like. You can hide all of the black squares for example, which looks more clean and when printing, saves quite a bit of ink! :)

Or you can go even wilder, and change the background of the black squares of your crossword puzzle to create a brand, theme or other look that you prefer.

To create even more fun interactions with your crossword puzzle, try out the 'Play in teams' feature on the Premium-tab. It sets up team registrations and once you start the team battle, it will connect all of the team members.

Every time a team member enters a correct answer in the crossword puzzle, it will synchronise this given answer with the rest of the team so that you can finish the puzzle together.

Extra cool is the team dashboard that you have as the crossword puzzle owner, via the Premium > 'Open Control room'. There you can see the progress of each team and monitor who finishes first! :-)

If your website or the player does not have a lot of horizontal space on their screen, then it might be a good fit to change the layout of the crossword puzzle. This can be done via the 'Questions position' option on the Premium-tab.

This can be switched to either 'Right' (default), 'Bottom' and even 'Hidden'. When you hide the question list, the active question will still pop up when you select a crossword puzzle cell, so this can be real efficient way to embed your puzzle!

The manual crossword builder allows you to surpass the automated capabilities of the crossword generator.

Instead of generating the words in a random grid, you can pick the locations and intersections yourself, creating tight, extra professional looking crossword puzzles.

You can enter the manual crossword maker via the black and white human head icon (and switch back to the crossword generator in the same way)

The cryptic crossword clues are not generated for you automatically, but of course you can create your own cryptic crossword puzzle with the 'regular' crossword puzzle generator

Add hints that can be interpreted in multiple ways, think of small word jokes or find words which contain the exact same letters as other words and create an anagram clue.

Cryptic crossword puzzles are super cool and fun to solve. They are the origin of why I created Puzzel.org in the first place! :)

If you are a crossword puzzle maker in your heart and only want near-perfect newspaper crossword grids to be your repertoire, then you don't have to look further!

The manual crossword builder allows you to insert words wherever you want and as compact as you want. You can intersect multiple words without requiring black squares to get the awesome newspaper crossword feel.

Try it out and create your magazine, newspaper or hobby project crossword in the best version.