Crosswords and Swedish-Style Crosswords: Generation Options Explained

Where do you find the generation options?

Open your crossword project and switch to the 2. Generate area. There you can access the "Generate options" dialog – the compact settings window that decides how your puzzle is created automatically. All settings apply both to classic crossword puzzles and to Swedish-style crosswords with clues placed directly in the grid.

The best part: you can't break anything. Every change only takes effect at the next generation run, and one click on Generate lets you try out new settings immediately. If you don't like the result, simply adjust the options again – your best puzzle is always safe, because you decide which result you keep.

If you're building a puzzle for the first time, we recommend starting with the step-by-step guide Create a crossword puzzle – it shows how the word list, generation, and export work together. Here, we'll now dive deep into each individual option.

Sorting words: long words first, duplicates and isolated words

The "Sorting words" section contains three checkboxes that determine the order and rules by which your words are processed. All three are small helpers with a big impact:

Try to incorporate long words first

When this option is enabled, the generator places the longest words from your list first. That may sound minor, but it's a real quality lever: long words are the backbone of the puzzle. They offer many letters and therefore many docking points where shorter words can cross later. If they're placed last, there's often no room left for a 12-letter word in an already well-filled grid.
Recommendation: Leave it enabled almost always. Only disable this option if you deliberately want to experiment and produce completely different grid layouts.

Avoid duplicate words

This option ensures that each word appears only once in the puzzle. That's especially valuable when your word list comes from several sources – for example your own list plus automatic fill words from the built-in word library – and individual terms appear twice. A puzzle that asks for "SUN" twice quickly looks unprofessional and confuses your solvers.
Recommendation: Keep it enabled. There's hardly ever a reason to allow duplicates.

Remove isolated words

Sometimes the generator places a word that doesn't cross any other word – it "floats" isolated in the grid. Such isolated words are considered a blemish in the puzzle world: without an intersection, solvers get no letter hints at all, and the grid looks fragmented. With this option, isolated words are removed automatically after generation.
Recommendation: Enable it for professional puzzles. If you want every word from your list in the puzzle – for example in a personal gift with fixed names – can turning it off make sense.

Word restrictions: minimum and maximum word length

With the two fields "Minimum word length" and "Maximum word length" you define which words are admitted to the generation at all. Words that are shorter or longer are automatically filtered out before generation – they appear neither in the grid nor in the list of used words.

Why word length matters so much

Very short words with only two letters offer little puzzle fun and quickly feel like arbitrary gap fillers. On the other hand, a word longer than your grid is wide or tall simply cannot be placed – it would be ignored in every generation run. So the word length restriction lets you control both puzzle quality and target audience at the same time:

• Minimum word length 3: The proven classic – short helper words remain allowed, meaningless two-letter entries disappear.
• Minimum word length 4–5: For more challenging puzzles with more substantial terms; the grid tends to become slightly looser as a result.
• Maximum word length: Match it to your grid size – in a 15×15 grid, words longer than 15 letters cannot be placed.

Hands-on tip for teaching: For elementary school puzzles, a maximum word length of 8–10 letters works well so that younger children can grasp the terms easily. You'll find more ideas for educational puzzles in the article Using puzzles in the classroom.

Random start words: variety vs. density

This option is the generator's creativity dial. It determines how many words are placed at random positions in the grid at the very start of generation, before the actual optimization begins. From these starting points, the puzzle then grows crossing by crossing.

The trade-off behind it – explained simply

Imagine starting a jigsaw puzzle from a single corner: everything grows together compactly. If instead you start simultaneously at five scattered spots, several islands emerge that can't always be joined cleanly at the end. It's exactly the same here:

• Low value (default: 1): The puzzle grows from a single start word – this usually produces the densest, most interconnected grid with the most intersections.
• Higher value (e.g. 3–10): Multiple starting points create more varied, more surprising layouts – but tend to reduce the number of intersections between words.

Recommendation: Stick with the default value of 1 if maximum grid density matters to you. Increase the value step by step if the generated layouts start to look too similar and you'd like more variety between generation runs.

These values are starting points, not laws – the ideal combination depends on grid size, word list, and taste. That's exactly what makes experimenting with the options so much fun: every change becomes visible instantly with a click on Generate. To get a feel for the range of possible results, take a look at our puzzle examples with free downloads and the screenshots of the Puzzle-Generator app.