1. Tools of the Trade

Free Stuff on the Internet

There are countless programs out there that will help you put together a crossword puzzle. This guide uses images from CrossFire, which has a one-time fee; a free alternative, which the Centre uses to host and distribute its puzzles, is Crosshare; and many more are easy to find.

This sort of program is extremely helpful, and has revolutionized how crosswords are made, by ensuring that each word you consider has a viable path to a complete crossword - and therefore ensuring you don't spent hours trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

CrossFire has gone through a number of wordlists, putting together a list of five-letter options for 2-DOWN. The words in bold (such as AROMA) can form a functional crossword; the crossed-out words will eventually lead to a dead-end. 

The program does this by reading long lists of words and phrases that you would like to include in your puzzles. These 'dictionaries' (wordlists) look something like the below: each entry is written out, followed by a semi-colon and a number telling the software how frequently you would like this word to be suggested, from 0 (never) to 100 (as much as possible). 

At some point, you will likely wish to go through your wordlist in greater detail, removing those words that you don't like - because they're obscure, because they have a 'bad vibe', because they rub you the wrong way - while adding in words that better reflect you and your lived experience.

Every time you remove a word, you save your future self time, because the computer won't usher you along a path where that word is unavoidable; and every time you add a word, you make your art that much more personal. Time improving your wordlists is time well spent.

The Internet offers up a number of free wordlists that you can collect and combine to put together your own puzzles, typically formatted as .dict or .txt files. The Centre is not associated with and cannot endorse any third-party lists, but is providing links to the following as starting points for your research:

• Spread the Word(list)
• Expanded Crossword Name Database
• XWord Info (paid)

The Centre's Wordlists

The Centre offers a few wordlists for free public use. While online resources can provide a boost to constructors, few are targeted to the Canadian audience.

The first of the Centre's wordlists, the Canadianization Wordlist, tells your construction software to use colour (and never the American color, set at 0), airplane (and never the British aeroplane), and veranda (and never the Australian verandah). This means that you can use wordlists off the Internet, without the frustration of having an otherwise-perfect puzzle stuck with non-Canadian spelling.

You can download the lists off Google Drive below:

• Canadianization Wordlist - last updated 2025/05

• Canadian Politics Wordlist - last updated 2025/05

The other issue with wordlists off the Internet is that many will rarely, if ever, spit out Canadian vocabulary like loonie, Tim Hortons, Québécois, or Métis. The Canadian Politics Wordlist above is a starting point, providing your construction program with a bank of Canadian vocabulary and names.

A note: the Centre's wordlists will never be complete or perfect reflections of our language and culture. However, our choice of words is important: calling this initiative the Centre for Canadian Crosswords, spelled that way, is not a coincidence. To help us improve our wordlists, please do not hesitate to flag any missing or incorrect entries.

The Age of Stodgy Crosswords

In the olden times, the constructor would put pen to paper, constantly checking special dictionaries to identify six-letter words where the second letter was W and the fourth was E; and sometimes, a word that did fit that criteria created a different, unfixable problem, which could only be discovered after much painstaking work. Back when that encyclopedia-like reference material was cutting-edge technology, its limitations meant that, sometimes, constructors and editors decided that it was worth stumping solvers with the names of 18th century colonial governors or scientific taxonomy, to avoid having to start over yet again. This left crosswords with something of a stodgy reputation, where you would need to be an expert in so many niche fields to have even a chance of completing one. 

Though they are a good start, many of the wordlists available for free online were put together by focusing on quantity over quality: scraping every title off Wikipedia will quickly get you a lot of valid words, but it will also get you those very same 18th century colonial governors and scientific taxonomies that bedeviled solvers decades ago.