Crossword Sizes

Forget the dimensions — how long have you got?

Nobody wakes up wanting an 11×11. They want fifteen minutes of something absorbing, or two minutes of something before the bus, and the grid size is just the dial that delivers it. So the short version, and you can stop reading here quite happily:

• Under two minutes — a micro crossword, 3×3 or 4×4. Six or eight answers. Genuinely a whole puzzle.
• Five minutes — a mini, 5×5, ten answers. The classic phone-in-hand size.
• A tea break — a themed 7×7 or 9×9 from any of our forty-one themes.
• A proper sit-down — a midi, 11×11 or 13×13, where answers get long enough to feel like an achievement.
• The daily ritual — the full-size 15×15 daily crossword, same puzzle for everyone, once a day.
• An afternoon — a Sunday, 21×21, which you are allowed to walk away from and come back to. That's the format, not a failure.

Every size we make, with the real numbers

Most pages that answer "how big is a crossword?" will tell you a 15×15 has "around 70 to 80 clues", which is a fact about newspapers, not about the puzzle in front of you. These are our own grids, measured from the actual shape libraries our engine builds from — so the answer counts are exact, not remembered.

Answers, longest answer and checked-letter share are computed at build time from the grid-shape libraries in our fill engine, across all 375 shapes we currently use — so this table updates itself whenever we add grids. "A typical sitting" is our own estimate, not a measured average; solvers vary enormously and nothing here is timed.

The counter-intuitive bit: the smallest grids are the tightest

Look down the "letters checked twice" column and you'll find the opposite of what you'd expect. In our 3×3, 4×4 and 5×5 mini grids, every single letter belongs to two answers at once — 100% checked. In a British-style 13×13, more than half the letters sit in only one answer.

A double-checked letter cuts both ways, and this is the thing most size guides miss. For you, it's generous: every letter gets confirmed twice, so a half-remembered word gets voted on by its neighbours. For us it's brutal, because a grid where every letter must satisfy two words at once demands a very large word list — which is exactly why our themed puzzles use an airier weave than the mini does, and why a 3×3 is a double word square, one of the hardest small objects in word puzzling to construct. Nine letters doing eighteen letters' work.

The flip side is the British-style grid, where a single-checked letter means the clue has to carry you on its own. If you want the difficulty dial, that's it — it isn't the size at all. Our British crosswords page goes into the lattice tradition properly, and Sunday crosswords takes on the related myth that a giant grid must be a hard one.

What actually changes as the grid grows

Not just the count. The length of what you're writing changes, and that's what makes a big grid feel different rather than merely longer. A 5×5 can only ever hold three-, four- and five-letter answers. By 11×11 the grid has room for ten-letter answers, and long answers behave completely differently while solving: they cross five or six other words, so one lucky guess at a ten-letter answer can crack a whole neighbourhood. Short-answer grids give you no such highways — you inch along.

Answer count grows faster than you'd think, too, because it scales with area. Doubling the width roughly quadruples the work: our 5×5 mini holds ten answers, the 11×11 holds two to three dozen, and the 21×21 Sunday runs past a hundred and twenty. That's why we lay Sunday clues across a second sheet in the printable packs — a 21×21 and its clue list simply will not share one page legibly.

Same dimensions, different puzzle

Worth knowing before you pick by number alone: two of our sizes come in two flavours, and the shape matters more than the measurement. The guide to crossword types explains how grid style, clues and theme can change a puzzle of any size.

5×5 is our mini size and also our themed-small size, but they are not the same puzzle. The mini uses a dense, fully-checked shape and draws on the whole word list; a themed 5×5 uses a waffle shape with six answers, because a single topic's vocabulary can't fill a fully-checked grid — a real constraint we write about honestly on every theme page.

13×13 is both our midi Full size and our British Classic. Identical dimensions; completely different feel. The midi is woven American-style with a lot of medium answers, while the British grid is a lattice with blocks at regular intervals, about three answers fewer, and far more single-checked letters. If you've ever wondered why a British newspaper crossword looks different from an American one at the same size, that's the answer, and it's visible in the table above.

Sizes for children, and sizes for paper

Two things this page deliberately doesn't try to answer, because they have proper homes of their own. If you're choosing for a child, the age bands on kids crosswords match size to reading level rather than to time. If you're choosing what to print, printable crosswords covers how each size lands on A4 — small grids two to a page, midis one to a page, Sunday across a spread — plus the large-print option, which re-lays the page rather than zooming it.

How our grids get made at every size

Each size has its own hand-checked library of grid shapes, and finding them is most of the work: a random pattern of black squares almost never produces a fillable grid at 13×13 or above, so the big libraries were grown by mutating shapes that did work, then testing each survivor against the real word list. Every puzzle you press for is then woven fresh in your browser and checked against the ones you've already played, so you won't be handed a repeat. The whole process is on how we make our puzzles.

Common questions

What's the "standard" crossword size?

By convention rather than by law: 15×15 for a weekday newspaper puzzle and 21×21 for a Sunday, in the American tradition. British dailies are typically 13×13 or 15×15. There is no governing body — a crossword is any symmetric grid of interlocking words, and the standard sizes are just the ones that fitted a newspaper column comfortably in the 1920s and never changed.

Why are nearly all your sizes odd numbers?

Because crossword grids are traditionally symmetrical when you rotate them 180 degrees, and an odd-sized grid has a true centre square to rotate around, which makes handsome patterns easy and ugly ones obvious. 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15 and 21 all behave. Our 4×4 micro is the one deliberate exception, and it works because at that size you can hand-check every shape there is.

Is a mini a "real" crossword?

Yes, and our 5×5 mini is arguably more crossword than a big grid is: every letter in it is checked twice, which is the strictest construction standard on this whole page. A small crossword is a small crossword, not a simplified one. What it isn't is a long one — if the pleasure you're after is the slow build across an hour, no mini will scratch it, and that's a genuine argument for going up a few sizes rather than doing six minis in a row.

Which size is best if I'm new to crosswords?

A themed 5×5 or 7×7, and the theme matters more than the size — a grid where every answer is about animals or food narrows your guessing enormously, which is the real beginner's advantage. Once the crossings feel natural, step up to a 9×9 in the same theme, then try a midi. Going straight to a 15×15 as a first crossword is the usual way people decide, wrongly, that they're bad at these.