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The crossword above is real: press New puzzle for a fresh layout, Answers to check your work, Print for a clean sheet, or PNG to save the image. Every clue is written for the word it defines — nothing here is a category name standing in for a clue. It is free, unlimited, and needs no account.
What follows is the part a button can't tell you: how the layout actually gets built, which size to print for who, and what to do once you want more than one puzzle.
How the grid gets built
The generator starts from a pool of words that each carry a real clue, sorts them longest first, and places them one at a time: the first word goes across the middle of the grid, and every word after that is only accepted if it crosses at least one letter already on the board. A word that can't be made to cross anything gets skipped rather than dropped in disconnected. Once placing is done, the grid is trimmed down to just the cells that hold a letter or sit between two letters, and every word-start gets numbered left to right, top to bottom — the same numbering convention as a newspaper crossword.
That crossing rule is also the honest explanation for why a puzzle sometimes comes out with fewer clues than its size promises. Hard asks for 16 words; if the pool of eligible clued words for that grid can't supply 16 that all cross something, the puzzle stops at whatever it could place cleanly. A 14-clue hard puzzle is not a bug — it's what happens when the crossing requirement is taken seriously instead of padding the grid with words nobody can actually see.
The three sizes, and who each one suits
| Size | Grid | Clues | Word length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 11 × 11 | 8 | 3–7 letters |
| Medium | 13 × 13 | 12 | 3–9 letters |
| Hard | 15 × 15 | 16 | 4–11 letters |
Easy is sized for a first crossword — short words, a small grid, and few enough clues that a beginner isn't staring at an empty page. Medium is the size most general-audience puzzle books use. Hard adds both more clues and longer words, which is where the crossings start doing real work: you're rarely filling a hard grid from the clues alone, and cross-checking against intersecting letters becomes part of solving it.
Printing it clean
Print sends the grid and both clue lists — Across and Down — to one sheet, with the size picker and buttons hidden from the printed page. The order that gives you a real puzzle and a real answer key: print once with Answers off, then turn Answers on and print again. The PNG download works the same way and renders at three times screen resolution, so the grid and the small clue numbers inside each cell stay sharp instead of pixelating when you scale the image up.
Using this in a book you sell
Every puzzle generated here is yours to use, including in a book you publish. What this page won't do is give you volume: it's one puzzle at a time, sized to stay readable inside an article, not a hundred puzzles at a fixed trim with paired solution pages. KDP Creator builds crossword interiors at KDP trim sizes along with six other puzzle types, and hands back a ZIP of numbered 300-DPI PNG pages plus a MANIFEST.txt — not a finished PDF, so assembling the interior is still your job. Run the numbers first on the KDP royalty calculator.
If you want a themed puzzle instead of the general one above — Christmas, Animals, Chemistry, and 60-plus other themes, each with its own clued word list — the full library is at /printables.
FAQ
Do I need an account to use this?
No. The generator, the printables library, and every answer key are free with no sign-up. An account is only needed for the paid apps like KDP Creator.
Why did my hard puzzle come out with fewer than 16 clues?
Because a word only makes it into the grid if it crosses at least one word already placed. When the pool of eligible words for that size can't supply 16 that all cross cleanly, the generator stops short rather than force in a word that floats disconnected from the rest of the grid. The puzzle is still complete and solvable — it's just a size or two short of the label.
Is it okay to put these puzzles in a book and sell it?
Yes. There's no restriction on what you do with a puzzle once it's generated — publishing it in a book you charge money for is fine. Making a full book by hand out of a browser, one puzzle at a time, is slow — that's what KDP Creator is for — but nothing stops you doing it manually.
Is every puzzle different?
Yes. Each press of New puzzle seeds a fresh layout rather than pulling from a fixed set, so pressing the button ten times gives you ten different puzzles from the same word pool.
