What exactly is a midi crossword?
There's no official rulebook definition — "midi" is simply what solvers and publishers call the size that sits between the espresso-shot mini and the full-page daily. In practice that means grids from about 9×9 up to 13×13. Ours come in two sizes: 11×11 Classic, with roughly two dozen clues, and 13×13 Full, which is only two squares shy of the traditional newspaper 15×15 but keeps our easy-words-only promise. If a mini takes you three minutes and a full-size puzzle takes an evening, a midi is your fifteen-to-thirty-minute coffee companion.
Why the midi feels like a different puzzle, not just a bigger one
Grow the grid and something genuinely new happens: long answers appear. A 5×5 mini is all three-to-five-letter words, so every answer is a quick jab. A midi has room for CHOCOLATE, TRAMPOLINE, and WATERMELON — eight-, nine-, and ten-letter entries that anchor whole regions of the grid. Long answers change how solving works. Each one crosses many other words, so cracking a single big entry showers letters across an entire corner. Miss it on the first read, and the crossings hand it to you a few letters at a time until the penny drops. That slow reveal — the moment a half-filled L E M _ N A D E suddenly becomes obvious — is the midi's signature pleasure, and it simply can't happen in a five-wide grid.
The other difference is geography. A mini is one room; a midi is a house. You'll solve a corner, run dry, and migrate to another neighborhood of the grid, leaving the long answers as bridges between them. Finishing one is a genuinely different feeling from finishing a mini — less "nice jab", more "whole workout".
The stepping stone from mini to full-size
If you can finish our minis but full-page newspaper puzzles still feel like a wall, the midi is the missing rung on the ladder. The grid teaches big-puzzle skills — working in sections, banking easy crossings before attempting long entries, coming back to a stubborn corner later — but the clues stay at our everyday-words level, so you're never stuck because of some obscure river in a geography quiz. Solve midis for a few weeks and the full-size puzzles get noticeably less scary. That's not a sales pitch; it's just how crossword stamina gets built.
How to solve a bigger grid (without getting lost)
- Do a gimme pass first. Read every clue once and fill only the ones you're sure of. On a midi that first pass usually seeds every corner of the grid.
- Work neighborhoods, not numbers. Instead of solving 1, 2, 3 in order, finish the corner you've already started — crossings there are half-filled and cheap.
- Treat long answers as bridges. An eight-letter entry with four crossings filled is usually guessable, and solving it carries you into the next section.
- Stuck? Change rooms. The best hint for a stubborn corner is a letter arriving from somewhere else. And if you're truly stuck, Check flags wrong letters without spoiling the answer.
Why our grids look the way they do
Sharp-eyed solvers will notice two things. First, every row and column contains at least one black square — there are no eleven- or thirteen-letter answers spanning the whole grid. Second, our longest answers run to ten letters, not the flashy fourteen-letter show-offs of a themed Sunday. Both are deliberate. Every answer on this site comes from our hand-curated list of everyday words, each with clues written for it, and we'd rather cap the length than do what grid-filling software does when it gets desperate: pad the puzzle with crosswordese — the ERNEs and OLEOs that make crosswords feel like homework in a dead language. Same reason we build 11×11 and 13×13 rather than jumping straight to 15×15: a dense full-size grid needs a vocabulary of tens of thousands to stay smooth, and we'd rather stay easy and honest than big and obscure. You can read more about our approach on how we make our puzzles.
Print a midi pack
The midi is the classic pencil-and-paper size — one grid fits a page with all its clues, which is exactly how we lay them out. Open Download a puzzle pack under the puzzle for a print-ready PDF: up to ten fresh puzzles, an answer key on its own pages, a name & date line for classrooms, and a large-print option that grown-up eyes appreciate. Puzzles you print are remembered on your device, so they won't come back around online.
Midi crossword FAQs
What size is a midi crossword?
Anywhere between a 5×5 mini and a 15×15 daily — most midis are 9×9 to 13×13. Ours are 11×11 and 13×13, which we think is the sweet spot: big enough for long answers, small enough to finish over a coffee.
Are midis harder than minis?
The clues are exactly the same friendliness — everyday words, no trivia archaeology. What changes is stamina: more clues, more crossings, and long answers that take a few visits to fall. Expect "pleasantly longer", not "harder".
How long should a midi take?
Most regulars finish our 11×11 in ten to twenty minutes and the 13×13 in fifteen to thirty. But it's a coffee break, not a stopwatch event — the timer-free design is on purpose.
Can I play on my phone?
Yes — the grid scales down to phone width, and tapping a clue jumps you to its spot. For the 13×13, a tablet or the printable pack is the roomiest experience.
I'm stuck on a long answer. Any advice?
Fill its crossings first — long answers are designed to be solved three letters at a time. If a pattern like S _ _ W F L _ K E is staring at you, our crossword solver can settle it.