Keyboard navigation needs some improvement. It's not easy to navigate because you are blocked from correct guesses. Also, it wanted me to guess "SASHA", but the hint was for "Sacha" (Baron Cohen).
Most of these entries are Naticks where the two crosses are proper nouns. That’s really unpleasant as it usually means there’s no way to figure out the cross unless you know the two terms.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Parker" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Parker</a><p>In 2008, he invented on his blog the crossword term "natick" (after Natick, Massachusetts) for an "unguessable" square crossed in both directions by proper nouns considered obscure.
Crosswords are one of those interesting things where there is a quite a bit of trans-atlantic difference which is worth taking a brief look at if you aren't familar. To quote Wikipedia:<p>> Crossword grids such as those appearing in most North American newspapers and magazines consist mainly of solid regions of uninterrupted white squares, separated more sparsely by shaded squares. Every letter is "checked" (i.e. is part of both an "across" word and a "down" word) and usually each answer must contain at least three letters. In such puzzles shaded squares are typically limited to about one-sixth of the total. Crossword grids elsewhere, ... have a lattice-like structure, with a higher percentage of shaded squares (around 25%), leaving about half the letters in an answer unchecked.
This is great! Thank you for sharing.<p>I have been running a 5x5 game that is more wordle like (i.e. no clues, guess entire words) at <a href="https://squareword.org" rel="nofollow">https://squareword.org</a> for the past ~2.5 years. Interestingly, when you exclude proper nouns, there is a relatively limited amount of possible 5x5 squares with common words - I am having to add some uncommon words to make it work. I guess with nouns included this is less likely to happen, should be a much larger space of possible words.
Neat idea (editing UX need a bit of work, perhaps); I would much like to see _all_ hints in parallel on my screen.<p>Solving a crosswords is a bit like solving an equation system, since the grid is equivalent to all row questions AND all column questions combined in a big mega-confunction, so it helps to see all at once.
That's nice ! Learned a few things today, it's more effective than hitting "random article" on wikipedia.
It would be nice if you could add an icon to the site, so I could find it more easily in my bookmark toolbar.