GridSmith Puzzle Maker

Make a crossword puzzle, a word search, or a sudoku right in the chat, play it there, and print it with an answer key.

Crossword maker: give it your vocabulary words and clues (or just the words, and a short clue is written for each) and GridSmith builds a real interlocking crossword grid with standard numbering and Across and Down clue lists. It searches many layouts to place as many answers as possible in a compact grid, strips accents and spaces from answers (ice cream becomes ICECREAM, shown as 3,5), and tells you plainly if an answer could not be connected. A crossword maker for teachers making weekly vocabulary worksheets, parents, and puzzle fans.

Word search maker: easy puzzles run words right and down for young kids, medium adds diagonals, and hard hides words in all eight directions including backwards. Every word is checked to appear exactly once, so there are no confusing duplicates in the filler letters, and any word that cannot be hidden is named with the reason.

Sudoku generator with answers: easy, medium or hard 9x9 sudoku, each verified by a solver to have exactly one solution. Easy and medium puzzles can be solved with simple elimination; every hard puzzle (24 to 30 givens) needs a technique beyond singles.

Play in the chat: type into the crossword with Check, Reveal word and Reveal all; drag across words in the word search; enter digits and pencil notes in sudoku. Print: every puzzle downloads as a printable PDF worksheet with name and date lines and a separate answer key page, in Letter or A4. The PDF always matches the puzzle on screen, and the same seed reproduces the same puzzle, so you can reprint an identical copy.

Limitations: crossword grids are open layouts with blank space around the words (not symmetric newspaper grids), crossword and word search grids use the letters A-Z only (accents are dropped, so words written only in Cyrillic or Greek cannot be placed), PDF titles and clues print in Latin alphabets including Polish, Czech and German, plus Greek and Cyrillic, but not Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic or Hebrew, and sudoku is the classic 9x9 format.