Hints & Help

General Hints for this Website

• Save Your Work Often

  — Your puzzle lives in the page until you press our "Save" button and provide an email address to help identify your puzzles later.


• Wait for Pages to Finish Loading— Since your puzzle lives in the page, it is good to give it a moment to arrive before advancing to the next page.


• Use the "Back" Button— The Back button and Forward buttons work as "Undo" and "Redo" operations.

Hints for Making Crossword Puzzles:

• Type Answer/Clue Pairs Exactly as Instructed

  — For each entry, put your answer first, then a slash character like /, followed by the clue.
  ⋅ Make sure to get the order correct: Answer left, clue right.
  ⋅ Let long clues wrap to the next line automatically without pressing the Enter key.
  ⋅ Do press the Enter key once or twice to signal the end of the clue.
  ⋅ Do not number your entries.
  ⋅ Use only / (slash) to separate answer/clue pairs ("\" is a backslash).
  ⋅ You can use the slash character again inside the clue.


• Avoid Extremely Long Answers— Crossword puzzles are very sensitive to the lengths of the answer words. You can have multi-word answers. Just realize that the letters must form an unbroken chain of boxes. If there are very many boxes they will be made smaller so the whole chain fits on the page.


• Consider Splitting a Jumbo Puzzle into Smaller Parts— If your puzzle has too many answer/clue pairs the result will be tiny boxes and tiny fonts. Consider dividing your puzzle into two or three smaller puzzles. Your boxes will be larger and your clues more legible. Smaller independent puzzles are better that a single multi-page puzzle that requires the solver to go back and forth between pages.

Hints for Making Word Search Puzzles:

• Type Only One Answer Per Line

  — Your answers can have spaces in them. Do not try to put more than one answer per line.
• Avoid Extremely Long Answers— The longest answer will often determine the size of the puzzle. For example, if you have 10 small words and one 20-letter word, your puzzle will have at least 20 rows and 20 columns of letters even though it will be very sparsely populated.

Getting Help

• Use Our "Contact Us" Page from within the puzzle maker

  — It transmits your puzzle and IP address to us. This information and your email address are essential for answering your question or resolving your problem.