Reference

Crosswords

Word lists, tools and writing about American crosswords - what grids repeat, why they repeat it, and how to fill one of your own.

Solving

Crosswords reuse a small vocabulary far more heavily than English does, which is why the same short answers keep turning up. Learning that vocabulary is a faster route to finishing a puzzle than a bigger dictionary is.

The 200 Most Common Crossword Answers Ranked by appearances since 2000, each with the clue it gets most often Crossword Helper Enter the letters you have and see what fits, ranked by how often it has been the answer

Making puzzles

A crossword is much easier to build than it looks, once the placement and numbering are handled for you. It prints as a worksheet and a separate answer key, and nobody has to sign in to use it.

Crossword Maker Turn a word list into a printable crossword, with clues suggested for you

Further reading

The most common answers in crosswords are changing Eight million answers counted, and the moment in 1994 the old vocabulary thinned out For teachers Turning a spelling or vocabulary list into a classroom puzzle Synonym Finder For the clue that wants another word for something

The lists and rankings on these pages come from the xd corpus, an open archive of 8,006,563 answers published in 46 American crosswords between 1913 and 2026. It is the same data the Crossword Helper ranks its suggestions with, so what you read here and what the tool tells you are one measurement rather than two.

Cryptic crosswords are a different game with a different vocabulary, and nothing here is measured against them yet.