Crossword Cracker

The free crossword solver that fills the gaps

Crossword Cracker is a fast, free crossword helper for when you are one or two letters short of an answer. Enter the letters you already have, mark the blanks, and the solver instantly lists every word that matches your pattern and length - ideal for quick crosswords, cryptics and the puzzle in your weekend paper.

How to use it

1. Type the letters you know in the order they appear in the grid.
2. Press the space bar for each blank square - it becomes a ? wildcard.
3. Hit Search. For example ch??t returns cheat, chart, chest and more.

A short history of the crossword

The crossword is barely a century old. On 21 December 1913, a Liverpool-born journalist named Arthur Wynne published a diamond-shaped "Word-Cross" puzzle in the New York World's Christmas "Fun" supplement, with the letters F-U-N already filled into the hollow centre. A typesetter's slip a few weeks later flipped "Word-Cross" to "Cross-Word", and the name stuck. The puzzle became a craze through the 1920s, crossed the Atlantic to Britain, and the harder, wordplay-based cryptic crossword evolved soon after. Today the humble grid runs in newspapers worldwide, and tools like this one exist for the moments a clue simply will not budge.

Tips for cracking a stubborn clue

Fill in the crossing answers first - even a single confirmed letter dramatically narrows the field. Not sure of the length? Count the squares and add one ? per blank. If a clue looks like a jumble of letters, it may be an anagram, so pop them into the anagram solver. To see which words a set of letters can build, try the Scrabble word finder.

Frequently asked questions