How We Make Our Puzzles

We believe you deserve to know how the puzzles you solve are made — especially in an age where "auto-generated" often means "nobody checked this." Here's our process, honestly described.

1. The word list comes first

Everything starts with our word list: thousands of everyday words, each one chosen on purpose. We deliberately exclude the classic crossword filler — the ERNEs and OLIOs that make traditional puzzles feel like a vocabulary exam. If a word wouldn't come up in normal conversation, it doesn't make the list.

2. Every clue is written, not scraped

Each word carries clues written specifically for this site — with help from modern AI writing tools, and reviewed for quality, accuracy, and family-friendliness. We don't copy clues from other publishers. Our house style: easy, warm, and occasionally worth a small groan.

3. A computer weaves the grid

Interlocking words into a valid crossword grid is a jigsaw with thousands of pieces — exactly the kind of work computers love. Our puzzle engine tries thousands of combinations from our word list until it finds a grid where every crossing works. The same engine powers every playable page here, from the 3×3 micro to the 21×21 Sunday, building puzzles right in your browser.

Each size has its own library of hand-checked grid shapes, and finding them is most of the work — a random scatter of black squares almost never produces a grid our word list can actually fill at 13×13 or above, so the big libraries were grown by mutating shapes that did work and then testing every survivor. If you'd like the numbers behind each size, they're on crossword sizes.

4. Quality gates, then people

Every generated puzzle passes automatic checks: every answer must be a real entry from our curated list, every crossing must be valid, no puzzle may repeat itself, and no clue may accidentally contain its own answer. Published puzzle sets get a human once-over on top.

5. Never the same puzzle twice

This is the question we're asked most, so here is the whole answer in one place. There is no fixed stack of puzzles on this site to work through and exhaust. When you press New puzzle, the engine weaves a brand-new grid on the spot, in your browser, from that page's word list — and before handing it over, it checks the grid against every puzzle you've already played there. If it's one you've seen, it throws it away and builds another.

Two answers to the obvious follow-up questions. What counts as "the same puzzle"? The set of answers, not the pattern of black squares — a grid holding the same words in a different arrangement would feel like a repeat, so we treat it as one. We also reject grids that merely overlap heavily with your recent puzzles, which is why consecutive puzzles feel different rather than merely non-identical. Do individual words come back? Yes, and they must — a theme has a few hundred words in it, so ANGRY will be along again. Most of our words carry two or three different clues and the engine prefers one you haven't been given, so the same answer usually arrives wearing a new hat.

Some honest small print. This memory lives on your device, not in an account, because we don't have accounts and don't want your email — so clearing your browser data resets it, and your phone and your laptop keep separate memories. Each puzzle size and each theme remembers separately, so switching sizes never costs you anything. Puzzles generated into a printable pack are marked as seen too, so you won't print one and then meet it again online. And if you play a single page long enough that fresh grids get genuinely hard to find, the engine loosens its standards a little rather than sitting there failing — the puzzles get less novel, but they keep coming.

The one deliberate exception is the daily crossword, which is the same puzzle for every visitor on a given date, on purpose — that's the entire point of a daily.

Why we work this way

Hand-crafting every single puzzle would mean a handful of puzzles a month. Our approach — human-curated ingredients, computer-assembled grids, checked output — means unlimited puzzles that still feel like they were made with care. Because the ingredients were.

Spot a bad clue or a word that shouldn't be there? Tell us — we'll fix the list, and every future puzzle benefits.