The crossword desk
Daily crossword puzzles
Three sizes of crossword, free and in your browser, printed fresh every day. A 4x4 nano, the classic 5x5 mini, and a midi that grows from 7x7 to 9x9 through the week.
The Mini Crossword
Small squares, big finish.
The Midi Crossword
Bigger grid, bigger finish.
The Nano Crossword
The world's smallest crossword. Solve it in seconds.
About the crossword desk
The crossword is the oldest daily habit in puzzles, and the small ones are the reason it is still a habit. A full Sunday grid is an afternoon. A mini is a coffee. The appointment is what matters: one puzzle, printed at midnight US Eastern, the same for every solver, finished before you have decided whether you are properly awake. Ours are free, they run in the browser, and none of them asks you to make an account first.
The Nano Crossword is the smallest crossword anyone prints: a 4x4 with no black squares at all, eight words interlocking across and down. An open grid sounds harder and is the opposite, because every one of the sixteen letters is checked twice, once by its across and once by its down. Nothing is a guess you cannot verify, and one confident word hands you a letter in four other places at once.
The Mini Crossword is the classic 5x5, the shape most people mean when they say they do the crossword in the morning. It has room for a real theme entry and a little misdirection, and it still fits in the time the kettle takes. The Midi Crossword is the step up: a weekday ramp that starts at 7x7 on Monday and finishes at 9x9 on Sunday, so the week has a shape to it. It is the free answer to the paywalled midi everybody else charges for.
New here? Solve the nano first to learn the controls, since the crossings forgive everything, then take the mini tomorrow and let the midi grow on you through the week. Three grids and you are still inside ten minutes. When the clues stop calling, the daily word games are the rest of the word desk, and the daily logic puzzles ask nothing of your vocabulary at all.
