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Crossword Puzzles

My grandmother solved crossword puzzles her whole life, and I remember solving them with her when she visited. I’ve enjoyed crosswords ever since, and over time, I developed an interest in creating them. I constructed one puzzle that I’m proud of before deciding to get serious.

After reading the Crossword Constructor’s Handbook, I realized that the rabbit hole went deep. So I created a simple text file format, collected a bunch of crossword data, and promptly uncovered a plagiarism scandal. The gxd repository now has over 87,000 crossword puzzles, and is presumed to be the largest collection of crossword puzzles on the planet. (Email me if you want to play with the data or contribute!)

A multiplayer crossword solver for the terminal (2022)

a talk I gave at csv,conf,v4 How a File Format Led to a Crossword Scandal (2019)

How could you know anything of the matter? Crossword 8 (2017)

the crossword corpus gxd, a database of crossword puzzles (2016)

In 2016 I designed a plain-text file format for crossword puzzle data, and then spent a couple of months building a micro-data-pipeline, scraping tens of thousands of crosswords from various sources. Then, having all those crosswords in a simple format, I wanted to see if there were any common grid patterns–and discovered egregious plagiarism by a major crossword editor that had gone on for years. This is the article that triggered a crossword scandal. A Plagiarism Scandal Is Unfolding In The Crossword World (2016)