Most of us like crosswords – a general truth normally depicted by the inclusion of these puzzles in almost every newspaper   all around the globe. Crossword puzzles have recreative as well as educative use. Being a niche field, there aren’t too many crossword puzzle generators out there that are both competent as well as affordable.

The easiest tool for creating crosswords from a given set of words is EclipseCrossword. You mention the words and their respective clues choose a grid size for your crossword puzzle and your crossword is ready. If you aren’t satisfied with the generated layout, you are free to shuffle until you find the correct combination.

You can now print the crossword grid on paper, publish it inside a web page as an interactive puzzle or export in popular formats like Word or WMF (image). You may also save your puzzle in Across Lite format which is compatible with most other crossword software. See a detailed review of Eclipse Crossword to learn more.

Another alternative is the Puzzle Maker from Discovery that allows you quickly develop crossword puzzles right inside your browser. Enter the words with hints, mention the number of squares for the puzzle and hit the Create button. This will give you a PNG image of the crossword – quickly but you will have a little control over the layout of the puzzle grid

There is another method which is quite popular among amateur crossword compilers are at dowedo.net.  In addition to the free style, you can you create crossword puzzles that follow the British (higher percentage of black squares) or the American (more white squares) style. Once the crossword is created, wait for the approval and it is then made available on the public web for anyone to solve it online.

Crosswords Compilers for Professionals

Professional crossword makers, like those who work in the printed media like newspapers, magazines normally depend on commercial tools like Crossword Compiler and Crossword man to prepare crosswords. Follow this detailed guide to know which of these methods can be adopted   for your work. There’s also a DIY option in case you would like to create a crossword grid manually.

Embed Crosswords in Web Pages

The Eclipse Crossword tool mentioned above can output your crossword puzzle in standard HTML format that you can then easily embed inside any web page using the IFRAME tag.

Another option called Across Lite – available for both Mac and Windows. Here you need to write the crossword in a standard format, save this file to across format (puz) with the help of Across Lite and then publish it here. You’ll get an interactive version of the crossword puzzle that you can easily embed in any web page using JavaScript.