347,784 clues searchable, from 6,472 published puzzles
Set the length, fill in the letters you already have, and add the clue if you have it. Every answer here comes from a real published puzzle.
The card fills in as you type.
Nothing written in yet.
A letter narrows by shape, a clue narrows by meaning. Either works alone; together they usually leave one answer.
Every crossword The New York Times published between November 1993 to August 2011, read end to end and filed clue by clue. That is 6,472 puzzles, 347,784 clues, 89,927 distinct answers and 692 setters and editors credited by name.
It is a closed archive rather than a live one, and it is worth being plain about what that means. A clue printed this morning is not in here. Nor is every crossword ever set — this is one newspaper, read thoroughly, not a sweep of all of them. What it does give you is provenance: when an answer appears on this site, it appeared in a real puzzle on a real date, and the page tells you which.
Count the squares in the grid and set that number first. It is the single most useful thing you know, and it does more work than most solvers expect: of the 89,927 answers on record, only 10.2% are four letters or shorter, so a length of seven or eight has already discarded the great majority of the archive before you have typed a letter.
Then fill in the letters you are sure of, in the positions they occupy in the grid. Leave the rest blank — a blank means “anything”, not “nothing”. Two crossing letters in the right positions will usually cut a list of hundreds to a handful. A letter narrows by shape and a clue narrows by meaning; they are independent, which is why using both together so often leaves exactly one answer standing.
Short clues are the ambiguous ones. The clue “Split” has 43 different answers on record — it has been set as a noun, a verb and an adjective, in lengths from three letters upward, by different setters over many years. On its own it tells you almost nothing. With a length and one crossing letter it usually tells you everything.
This is the ordinary condition of crossword clues, not an edge case. The clue is a compressed definition, and compression is lossy. The grid is what restores the missing information, which is why a solver who has two letters is in a far stronger position than one who has none — and why this site asks for the letters first and the clue second.
Some answers appear far more often than their place in ordinary English would suggest. ERA is the most-used answer in the archive, recorded 374 times across 250 different clues. Not 250 appearances of the same clue — 250 distinct ways of pointing at the same three letters.
The reason is structural. Every letter in a crossword grid belongs to two answers at once, so a setter filling the last few squares needs short words rich in common vowels to make the crossings work. Words like these — old-fashioned, vowel-heavy, flexible in meaning — survive in crosswords long after ordinary writing has finished with them. Solvers call it crosswordese, and recognising it on sight is one of the real skills of the puzzle. If a three-letter answer is giving you trouble, the odds are good it is one of a few dozen words you have met before.
Most clues are written once and never reused. Around four in five of the clues filed here appear exactly once in the whole archive, so a clue copied straight from today’s grid very often has no entry — and that is the normal case, not a failure of the search.
When that happens the site looks for clues that mean something similar rather than clues that read the same, and says plainly that it is offering near matches. Treat those as suggestions to test against your grid, not as records: the letters you already have are the better judge. A recorded answer is evidence; an approximate one is a lead.
Each answer here is filed with the publication it appeared in, the date it was printed, and the setter credited with it. That is the point of the archive, and it is what separates a recorded answer from a guess. If a clue-and-answer pair is on this site, you can see where it came from; if it never appeared in the archive, the site says so rather than inventing something plausible.
It also means you can read in either direction. From a clue you can reach every answer ever filed under it, and from an answer you can reach every clue ever written for it — which is often the more interesting journey, and a good way to learn how a particular setter thinks.
Crosswords are written by named people, and the archive credits 692 of them. Manny Nosowsky is the most prolific setter on record with 246 published puzzles, followed by Elizabeth C. Gorski with 188. Each has a page listing what they published and when.
Browse every setter on record, or start from a clue above and follow it back to whoever wrote it.