Mini Crossword

Tap a square and type. Tapping the same square again switches between the across entry and the down entry, and the clue for whichever one you are in shows above the grid. Arrow keys move around, Tab flips direction, and backspace clears.

The grid checks itself. Fill every square correctly and it turns and tells you. There is no penalty for a wrong letter and no timer, so you can leave it half done and come back later.

You are not limited to one a day. A fresh grid arrives every midnight, but there are 420 puzzles here and the Next button moves straight to one you have not solved. Your progress through the whole set is kept in your browser.

Do the three letter entries first. A five by five with cut corners has four short entries and they are almost always the easiest. Each one you solve hands you a letter in three of the long entries.

Trust the crossings over the clue. If a clue reads oddly but the crossing letters force a word, the crossings are right. Definitions describe one sense of a word and it is rarely the sense you thought of first.

Fill in the obvious plurals and tenses last. An S or a D at the end of an entry is a guess until something crosses it. Putting it in early and building on it is how a grid goes wrong in a way that is hard to unpick.

If two entries fight, one of them is wrong. Clear both and start from whichever has the more specific clue.

Stuck on a pattern? The word finder searches by what a word starts with, ends with or contains, which is exactly the shape of a half-filled crossword entry.

Clues are definitions from WordNet, the lexical database built at Princeton University, cleaned up and shortened. WordNet is free for commercial use, and the attribution above is a condition of that licence rather than a courtesy.

This means the clues are honest definitions rather than the wordplay a human setter would write. "A noisy riotous fight" for MELEE is a fair clue; it is not a witty one. If you want cryptic misdirection, a hand-set puzzle elsewhere will serve you better. If you want a couple of minutes and a real solve, this will do it.

Grids are generated against the same dictionary as the rest of this site and every one is solved before it is published, so there are no unfair crossings and no entries that are not real words.