I’ve started another blog specifically for Christmas word searches! I have a huge collection of free printable Christmas word searches that I’ll be sharing with you all on a daily basis.
These will be an excellent resource for teachers to use over the next few weeks before the Christmas holidays begin. It will also be an excellent resource for parents who will be home with their children for up to two weeks, and need to keep them out of their hair!
We won’t be catering to just teachers, parents, and children, of course! I’ll also be posting some more difficult Christmas word search puzzles for the adults to do in their spare time as well.
Fellow unix geek and word search enthusiast Phil Paradis has written a Perl program that will allow you to create printable crosswords!
This UNIX Perl console application generates crossword puzzles from a list of words and clues. It’s intended to serve as a backend to programs which gather input data from users, then format the resulting puzzle into a human-readable format.
This is great news if you run your own web site. Using Phil’s script, you can easily automatically generate printable crosswords on your own web site, based upon input from the user. For example, the webmaster could build a form to allow it’s users to input a combination of words and hints, and have your web site create and display the word search for the user to immediately use. Pretty cool!
You an find Phil’s scripts here. Hopefully we’ll be able to implement this on this site, and start sharing and trading your original printable crosswords!
Here’s a printable crosswords to take with you over the holidays. This week, The BeeKeeper brings us “Stop. Pay Troll.”
“And what”, you might ask, “do you have for us this week?” Well, we’re glad that you asked. What we’ve got is 36 black squares, 189 white squares, and 76 clues — all artfully arranged in such a way as to maximize your solving pleasure. “But you just described an ordinary crossword puzzle, right?” Well, perhaps, but I could just as easily be describing a most excellent crossword puzzle. You get to decide for yourself which one this is. Once you figure it out, feel free to let us know. The comment section is always open.
I hadn’t had a chance to work on this one yet, but I’m sure it will be good as all the rest of them are!
The ornament features a woman sitting in a chair, crosswords puzzle in her lap, pondering what her next answer is going to be. Behind the chair is a white placard with a crossword puzzle on it, off to the left side. The right side, however, can be custom tailored with you loved-one’s name, or other message that will fit in the given space.
I just ordered three of them for the three crossword addicted females in my family. Hopefully they’ll love their Christmas crosswords ornaments!
The BBC has a television show called How Clean Is Your House? This seems similar to TLC’s Clean Sweep shown here in America. The idea behind the show is simple: Find some of the raunchiest places you can find where people are knee-deep in filth, and help them clean it. For some reason, there is an audience for this, so people are willing to sit and watch these shows, which makes advertisers happy. Voila! You have a hit TV show.
Recently How Clean Is Your House? featured The Crosswords Lady. Rosie Lovelady is a printable crosswords fanatic. Her flat hasn’t been cleaned in twenty-four years. Yes, you read that right, twenty-four years! The show is posted up on YouTube in three parts. It is truly amazing to me how people can let some things become such an obsession that they let everything else in their life go. Watch these videos, and maybe you won’t feel so bad the next time you let the dirty dishes stack up on Sunday while you work on your printable crosswords for that day!
I guess it’s true: Anything you could possible imagine is on the Internet, somewhere! It’s estimated that more than 70% of the Internet’s traffic is either porn or spam e-mails, or a combination of the two. So there is obviously a high demand for adult-related material, and why should printable crosswords be any different?
Back in 2006, Jorge Stafford who writes over at Nerve.com, had published a series of naughty printable crosswords. Maybe you could print out one of these to pack in your husband’s lunch to get him ready for a night of passion. Or maybe your just a pervert who likes printable crosswords. Whatever your reason or desire, Mr. Stafford has some fun for you!
You can see the list of all ten naughty crosswords here. Clicking on each one will take you to a page where you can play online. You can, however, find printable versions by clicking on the little printer icon on the puzzles upper right corner. But to simplify things for you, here are direct links to the naughty printable crosswords:
So go grab a copy of these, you never know when they might come in handy! Bachelorette parties, getting your crosswords addict spouse in the mood, or maybe to do together over a dimly light dinner one night. I’m sure you can find a way to put some naughty printable crosswords to good use!
I’ll have the pleasure (sigh) of joining millions of other Americans in the tradition of traversing the United States, trying to squeeze in a visit to as many family member’s homes as I can in a four day period for Thanksgiving. And since this year we’re not doing it at our house, this means we get to drag along a four-year-old, and torture her as well as ourselves! Luckily I’ll have plenty of printable crosswords with me to keep me busy, as I sit quietly in the corner, checking my watch every five minutes to see if it’s Friday yet.
So, I’ll post new crosswords that I run across as I can, but there be a slow down over the week until I return. I wish everyone a safe and happy Thanksgiving!
It seems that Martha Stewart is a fan of printable crosswords, too! Her tip is actually about weddings. Martha suggests that the next morning, you have a post-wedding brunch, where you can share some personal time with your family and recollect on the evening before. But, in true Martha style, you can’t just sit down over coffee and bagels, you have to spruce it up a bit.
Let guests discover the details of your romance at a next-day brunch. Download software from Variety Games that lets you create a customized crossword. Place the puzzle and a classic No. 2 pencil dressed with ribbon at each setting. Create a cheery tableau with sunny linen napkins, pewter-gray plates, and yellow-orange place cards, with mimosas completing the color theme.
So if you are in the middle of planning your wedding, don’t forget the printable crosswords!
Jeez, we hadn’t even put the Thanksgiving turkey in the oven yet, and we’re already being bombarded with Christmas stuff! Even the local grocery store is already full of Christmas junk, festive music playing, and animated Santas. Apparently, the same goes for printable crosswords.
So if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! Dave Fisher has published a Christmas Printable Crosswords that you can easily print out and go to town on. Ho ho ho!
One of my favorite web sites is Lifehacker, a web site dedicated to personal productivity and making your life a little bit easier. I ran across an article called “Mind Hacks: Ten Ways to Defeat Brain Drain“, and was surprised to find that one of the ten ways is to do printable crosswords!
Play a game Halo 3 players rejoice! Playing a game that gets you away from your draining thoughts is an excellent way to get past the sluggishness. You might prefer crossword puzzles or sudokus if you don’t like video games. Either way, playing a game lets you know life doesn’t always have to be so serious and focused. Make time for play too!
So there you have it! Not only are you making yourself smarter, increasing your vocabulary, and getting personal satisfaction, you’re also helping to keep you mind alert and focused. Another good reason to be addicted to printable crosswords!
Still holding on to that crossword puzzle that you’ve kept coming back to for days, but just can’t figure out the last few words you need? I found an online site called More Words that can help!
Here’s how it works. Say you have a three-letter word ending in ‘r’, but for the life of you can’t come up with the answer. Enter ‘–r’ in to More Words, and it will return a list of words all containing three letters ending in ‘r’. Or maybe you have ‘pu–le’; You’ll get back puddle, pungle, purfle, purple, and puzzle! Or maybe you want to know every word that contains the letters ’sswo’ in the middle. You would enter ‘*sswo*’, and get back that list of words. There are even more complex searches you can do, outlined on their examples page.
The only problem with this solution is that you’ll have to have a computer, or access to one, and it will have to have Internet access. This probably isn’t going to be a viable solution as you sit on the train during your morning commute. There is always the Franklin CWP-206 Pocket Crossword Solver. Twenty-five dollars might be a small investment in your sanity!
Pretty cool, huh? Of course you could use this site for a lot more than just solving printable crosswords, but it sure does come in handy! Cheating? Maybe! Satisfaction of finally finishing that damn puzzle, definitely!
I found a new blog you all will surely be interested in. It’s called Beekeeper Crosswords, and has a great selection of free printable crosswords for you to do! Every Wednesday, the BeeKeeper posts up a new original crosswords for you to do, on a variety of topics.
This week’s puzzle, The Work of the Weavers, was built to honor the BeeKeeper’s local knitting shop, Natural Stitches. What a great, and unique I might add, way to honor and promote a new business!
There are currently 19 free printable crosswords over at Beekeepers, with new crosswords added each week. This is surely one site you’ll want to keep tabs on!
The other great thing about their site is the fact that you can either play the crosswords online, or if you choose, you an download the printable crosswords in PDF format and play them on-the-go! The printable crosswords also sport a stylish grid with graphics, instead of just your standard black and white squares. Check it out!
Browsing through YouTube I came across an amazing video. Not the fact that it was well put together, produced well, and contains great content. But for the fact that this video depicts a person, driving down the road, working on a NYT crosswords puzzle draped over his steering-wheel, AND is filming it all as he’s driving down the road!
This should be an educational video for driver’s training courses for what not to do while driving. The guy even misses a turn at one point, has to put down the paper, stops and backs up in the middle of the road to make the turn, all while dodging an oncoming car. I know, your in disbelief; Watch for yourself:
Disclaimer: This website does not condone these actions! Don’t be an idiot! Keep both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, newspaper folded in the seat next to you, and your camera safely stowed away. These are the people that I have to deal with every day. For the love of God, just DRIVE!
Last night I had some free time and sat down to watch the movie Wordplay by Patrick Creadon and Christine O’Malley. If you’re a hardcore printable crosswords enthusiast, you will enjoy this documentary on the crosswords cult that exists in our society.
Witness the inner workings of Will Shortz, NY Times Editor and NPR Puzzle Master, and his brilliant, entertaining and often hilarious contributors as well as surprising celebrity fans. Wordplay takes us through the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament where almost five hundred competitors battled it out for the title “Crossword Champ” and showed their true colors along the way.
This documentary is not about the casual crosswords puzzler who occasionally does one while waiting in the doctor’s waiting room. Oh no. This is about the hard-core, die-hard, live-to-solve puzzlers. There are individual interviews with different people from across America who share an obsession with printable crosswords. Some of the people interviewed include Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton, Ken Burns, and The Indigo Girls.
You also learn a bit of history behind the NYT puzzles, how they come up with ideas, how they construct them, how puzzles are made to be more difficult, the rules of puzzle making, and the effects of certain types of puzzles on it’s solvers.
They also cover the World Crossword Puzzle Championship that takes place each March in Stamford, Connecticut. The viewer is taken through how the tournament is organized and operates, how players are ranked and scored, and finally taken to the final, where the top three finalists all compete against time and each other to solve their crosswords on large easels setup on a stage, while the crowd stares on.
Even if you only have a light interest in printable crosswords as a hobby, this documentary will be well received and will open your eyes to an entire almost underground-cult that exists around printable crosswords.
So check out the documentary Wordplay, I promise you won’t be disappointed! If you enjoy the documentary, there is also the Wordplay Official Companion Book by renowned crosswords maker Will Shortz. I haven’t had a chance to checkout the companion book yet, but from some of the reviews I’ve read, it’s a great extension to what’s covered in the movie. And a little secret, you can save a few bucks by buying them both together. Check out this page on Amazon.com, scroll down to the “Better Together” section to get your discount.
I found an interesting blurb in the entertainment section of the Wisconsin State Journal this morning that I thought some of you might find humorous (or sweet, for the females):
” In Boston, a 29-year-old convinced the creators of the Boston Globe Sunday crossword to include a wedding proposal in it so that when his crossword-infatuated girlfriend did the day’s puzzle and got to 111 across (“Generic proposal” (Jen, Eric proposal), she suddenly discovered the puzzle read, “Will you marry me?”
The good thing is, Eric knows up front of her crossword addiction. When he’s left to mill around the house looking for something to do while she’s curled up on the couch with her favorite printable crossword, he’ll have no one to blame but himself!
Being a fairly new parent (my Satan’s-Spawn daughter is almost 5), I’m starting to do some forward thinking about raising her. I ran across a wonderful book geared towards the 9-12 year old crowd, but went ahead and picked it up to have on our bookshelf. It’s entitled See What You Can Be: Explore Careers That Could Be For You!, and is a part of the American Girl Library.
The book covers almost fifty different potential career choices, ranging in careers from fashion design to astronauts. The unique thing about this book is that it is also filled with puzzles, quizzes, and pages for them to journal their thoughts after reading certain material. By the time they are done with the book, they will hopefully have learned a little bit about themselves, and maybe have a few new dreams and goals to shoot for.
So what does this have to do with printable crosswords? It’s actually one of the career choices covered in the book! And not only is the topic covered in the book, but then goes on with an activity to have your child create a crossword puzzle all by themselves!
Making printable crosswords doesn’t have to be just for fun, you can actually make a career out of it!
According to Wikipedia, there are several different types of printable crosswords variants that go beyond your basic odd grid shape or odd clues. Some of these variants require completely different methodologies for solving them, going above and beyond a typical crosswords puzzle. Today we’ll cover four of the major printable crosswords variants.
One of my favorites are “crossnumbers”. Crossnumbers is somewhere in between a crossword puzzle and sudoku. The clues are typically mathematical expressions or formulas, but could also be verbal clues to reference specific numbers, such as dates or population.
Next we have “fill-in crosswords”, or what some geeks call “plug-n-play crosswords”. The puzzles feature a grid that is partially filled in. Your objective is to fill in the blanks so that each word is valid and all integrate with each other with the proper spelling. Ironically, the words are typically longer because with this type of puzzle, the more characters you start working from, the easier the puzzle will be to solve.
There is also the “diagramless crosswords”, or to those across the pond, a “skeleton crosswords”. The puzzles follow your typical grid-style layout, but the majority of the clue numbers and black spaces are unspecified! Not only do you have to come up with the correct answers to the given clues, but you must also figure out how to arrange answers in to larger arrays, using properly spaced black squares. A lot of the puzzles follow the basic symmetry rule, while others employ left-to-right symmetry, and even others following specific shapes. If the symmetry is known up front, the player can use this to their advantage.
Lastly, and another one of my favorites, are the “cipher crosswords”. In a cipher crosswords, the clues for each entry are replaced by clues for each white cell of the grid. A number between 1 and 26 is printed in the corner of each white square. The numbers server as the cipher of the puzzle, meaning that cells with matching numbers will also have matching letters/answers. No two numbers will stand for the same letter throughout the entire puzzle. Typically, one or more of the number and letter cipher combinations are give to help you get started in solving the puzzle. It should be noted that these puzzles lean more towards codes than quizzes, therefore a completely different skill set is required to solve them. Using basic cryptography techniques such as guessing likely vowels are often the answer to solving these puzzles.
So rather than just trying to create your typical crosswords like everyone else, why not explore and research some of the possible variants? I like a good challenge, and some of these might take you days, or even longer, to solve.
Once you get really good a creating printable crosswords for a specific niche based upon a variant, the value of y our puzzle goes up tremendously. Helen Marie covers these topics, and more, on her web site.
Deon Melchior has written a great article entitled Enjoying Crossword Mind Puzzles. In the article, Deon gives some great tips on how to complete printable crosswords successfully. It’s a quick read, but a good one!
Deon points out some of the more obvious things such as using a pencil instead of a pen, knock out all the easy answers first, and always have a thesaurus and/or dictionary on hand.
Thanks Deon for the great article! Hopefully these tips will help our readers more effectively solve their printable crosswords.
If in addition to being a printable crosswords junkie you’re also a technology geek, then I have two extremely cool, inexpensive gadgets that you won’t be able to live without.
The first is the Franklin CWP-206 Crossword Puzzle Solver. It comes in at less than $30, and amazon has a few used up for around $25 or so. It’s pre-programmed with over 250,000 words and phrases taken directly from Merriam-Webster. In addition to crosswords, it can also easily and quickly solve Scrabble and Jumble puzzles too! It’s best feature is that it’s built with a typical clam shell design, meaning you can close the lid to protect the screen and keyboard while storing it in your pocket or purse. The instructions were printed on the inside of the top case, so every time you open it the directions are readily available.
Next is The NY Times Electronic Crossword Puzzle. This is a small and compact handheld crossword game platform, pre-programmed with The New York Times’ best crossword puzzles. Complete with a full QWERTY keyboard, it sports automatic power-off to save the batteries, which are only 2 tiny AAAs. It also allows you to save unfinished puzzles for later play! There is also a convenient check key that will highlight incorrect answers.
While these two devices wont allow you to make printable crosswords, they are two handy gadgets no crossword geek should be without!
I just stumbled across the Instant Online Crossword Puzzle Maker, which allows you to generate your own printable crosswords, and boy is it cool! You simply feed it in a list of words and clues, and it does all the rest for you! After clicking the ‘Create Puzzle’ button once your done filling in your criteria, you have the option to bring up a page of the printable crosswords it generated, and off you go! Now that you have used this easy tool to create your own unique printable crosswords, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be selling them and making some extra money on the side!
In addition to being a printable crosswords fan, I’m also an Amateur Radio operator. For those of you who might be fellow hams, you should check out the ARRL’s Amateur Radio Crossword Puzzler! New puzzles are constantly being added, and are of course, amateur radio themed. They provide a PDF copy that you can easily print out, and best of all, they’re free. At this point in our solar cycle and the way the HF bands have been behaving lately, it’s nice to have some printable crosswords to do, and still keep it hobby related. 73!
Here is a list of my top five favorite crossword and crossword-related books out right now that I would personally recommend. All of these are inexpensive and easily available from Amazon.com. If you are a crossword-fiend like I am, you’ll definitely want to check each of these out! But if nothing else, take a look at the last one in the list: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession.
The New York Times Monday Through Friday Easy to Tough Crossword Puzzles – The New York Times are known for their crossword puzzles. Any any serious NYT crossword solver knows that the puzzles get harder as the week goes on. By the time you get to the end of this puzzle book, you’ll be pulling your hair out, and enjoying every minute of it!
New York Times Crosswords for Your Coffee Break: Light and Easy Puzzles – The same great quality New York Times crossword puzzles that your used to, but shorter and easier. This is a small paperback book that will make it easy to have on hand when you’re waiting at the doctors office or in-line at the grocery store.
The People Puzzler – People Magazine is also well known for their crossword searches. In fact, by reading a few of the reviews on Amazon.com, that’s the sole reason a few people even buy their magazine! Here you can get an entire book of their world-famous crossword puzzles for less than ten bucks. You can’t go wrong with this one.
Simon and Schuster Super Crossword Puzzle Book #13 – If you’ll recall back to our recent post on the history of printable crosswords, you’ll remember that Simon and Schuster were the first publisher to start off the crossword puzzle book craze. Their latest edition builds on their known success for producing quality and challenging puzzles. Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession – We covered this book in our recent post Printable Crosswords Drama in World War II, and should be noted that this is NOT a puzzle book. The book’s author, Marc Romano, looks in to the world of the crossword addict, covering the history of printable crosswords, and even claims puzzle solving can make you into a better, more informed, fairer, and more tolerant person.” If you’re a true crossword junkie, this is one to have on your shelf.
So there you have it – my personal list of my top five favorite printable crosswords books at the moment. The good thing with this hobby is, the material istypically inexpensive, and these five are no different. But keep in mind, even though they are in inexpensive, they are still in extremely high demand. It amazes me that I’m already making money selling my own printable crosswords that I’ve come up with myself!
Posted by Printable Crosswords 
Posted by Printable Crosswords 
Posted by Printable Crosswords 
It seems that Martha Stewart is a fan of printable crosswords, too! 
