A custom crossword as a gift: how to choose the words and write the clues

ARLing s. r. o. · 9 October 2026

Collect the words: more ideas than you need

Start with words nobody else would guess. Our sample crossword for an invented couple, Anna and Daniel, has 15 words, among them LISBON for the city where they had their honeymoon, BISCUIT for the name of their first dog and COFFEE for how they met, because one of them spilled it on the other. That points to three good sources: places you have been, names, and small stories you both remember. Our crossword takes 10 to 25 entries, so write down more ideas than that and keep the ones you can clue in a few words.

A date makes a better clue than an answer. Numbers cannot go into the grid, so write 2019 as a clue, not as a word. A date also works on the cover: our product page suggests, for example, Our Story / est. 2019 for the cover and the keepsake page, and For Daniel, on our 7th anniversary under the title.

Turn a memory into a clue

Each entry is one line: the word, a colon, then the clue, for example PARIS: Where we got engaged. The clues in our sample are memories, not dictionary definitions: City where we had our honeymoon, Name of our first dog, How we met: you spilled it on me. Someone who was there will recognize them, while anyone else would have to guess.

The number of letters goes in brackets after every clue, so the solver knows how long the answer is. A name of two words goes into the grid as one: New York becomes NEWYORK, and the clue shows (3,4).

Read your clues aloud once before you order. Nobody writes or proofreads your clues for you. The software standardizes spacing and quotation marks, removes invisible formatting characters and replaces long dashes with commas.

What the grid can take

Our software reads your list with these rules:

• Letters A to Z. Accents are written without marks, so Zoë becomes ZOE.
• Up to 15 letters in a word, and each word only once.
• No numbers or symbols in the grid. Spaces, hyphens and apostrophes in a word are fine, as with New York above.
• A letter in common. A word that shares no letters with the others is left out, and the download page says which one and why; you can correct your list once on the same page.
• At least 10 usable entries. If fewer than 10 entries can be used, or the clues are too long to fit on one page, no file is made, and the page says what to change.

How long a clue can be, and how many words fit

Our product page recommends keeping each clue to 60 characters or fewer for 10 to 20 words, and 40 characters or fewer for 21 to 25 words, including spaces and punctuation. We measured how many words and how long clues fit. We ran the layout calculation of our order system on test lists of words with filler clues of a set length, 100 or 200 lists per setting. The calculation leaves out the final check in the browser that the order system runs afterwards, so a real order can differ.

So the rule of thumb is simple: with 10 to 20 words, keep each clue to 60 characters or fewer, and with 21 to 25 words, to 40 characters or fewer. A few longer clues did not stop a list from fitting: with 25 words, all 100 test lists fit when up to 9 clues had 60 characters and the rest had 29 characters.

More words also mean smaller squares to write in. In the test settings with clues of 29 and 39 characters, the median square was 12 mm with 10 words, 11 mm with 15 words, 8.6 mm with 20 words and 7.1 mm with 25 words, and the smallest our software allows is 6 mm. Shorter words help: with 15 words of 3 to 5 letters the median square was 12 mm, against 10.1 mm with words of 6 to 8 letters. If the crossword is for someone who prefers large print, choose fewer and shorter words.

Our custom crossword, and who it is not for

Our custom crossword turns your list into a free-form crossword, where your words cross each other, not a dense newspaper-style grid. You get one PDF in A4 and one in US Letter, each with 5 pages: the cover, how to play, the puzzle, the solution and a keepsake page for a frame. It costs 21.90 € on Etsy; in the EU, Etsy adds local VAT and shows the final total before you pay. The files are ready a few minutes after payment. Before they are released, a second, separate program checks that the words included in your crossword match your entries in capital letters, without spaces, accents or punctuation, and that every number matches its clue. Any entries left out are listed on the download page with the reason.

It suits an anniversary, a birthday, a wedding, Christmas or Valentine's Day, for a husband or wife, parents, grandparents or a best friend, when you share words nobody else would guess. It is not the right pick if you want a large, dense newspaper-style crossword, if you want someone else to write or proofread the clues, if you want something printed, framed or sent in the mail, if your words need letters other than A to Z, or if you have fewer than 10 words.

The crossword is laid out by puzzle software we wrote with the help of AI tools; the words and clues are your own. We use your words and clues only to build the crossword, and the files are deleted automatically 30 days after they are ready, so save them. If your list is ready, see the custom crossword.

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