3 Tips for Solving
Crossword Puzzles Online

More and more crossword fans nowadays are solving their daily crossword puzzles online, and for good reasons...

Online crosswords are incredibly convenient, environmentally friendly, and generally very cheap.

In fact, most of the crossword puzzles I download regularly are completely free!

Even better, most of the highest quality crossword puzzles published in American newspapers today are available online.

Ok, so there's plenty of motivation to make the switch from pen and paper to online crossword solving, but you already knew all this, right? Let's get down to the nuts and bolts...

Where to Find Quality
Crossword Puzzles Online

The task is not merely to find online crossword puzzles, but rather to find high quality crosswords. Naturally, free is even better! Here is a list of online crossword puzzles that are highly regarded in the crossword industry. Most of them are free, but those requiring a subscription are indicated with a red dollar sign ($)...

• $ New York Times (NYT)
• Los Angeles Times (LAT)
• CrosSynergy (CS)
• Jonesin'
• Ink Well (Ben Tausig)
• A.V. Club/Onion
• Chronicle of Higher Education
• Brendan Emmett Quigley
• Merl Reagle
• Wall Street Journal
• Boston Globe
• Washington Post Puzzler
• Newsday Saturday Stumper
• Newsday Daily
• L.A. Times Sunday Calendar (Bursztyn/Reagle)
• USA Today
• Universal Crossword
• New York Times Syndicated
• MacNamara's Band (Fred Piscop)
• Triple Play Puzzles (Trip Payne)
• WSJ Saturday (PDF)
• New York Times Syndicated (PDF)

How to Solve
Crossword Puzzles Online

Online crossword puzzles are usually served up in one of two ways. Many crossword publishers, like the New York Times, offer both formats.

In the first format, the crossword puzzle appears on the publisher's webpage, and you solve it interactively using the usual click & scroll keyboard functionality. Usually, the crossword widget will only work properly in your browser if you have Java installed. You probably already have Java installed on your computer, but if you don't, it's no biggie — Java is free, safe and easy to download and install.

The second way is to offer the puzzle for download. In this case you simply click on the download link and save the file to your computer. Once you have downloaded the puzzle to your computer, you then need to open it. To do this you'll need make sure you've installed the appropriate crossword solving program — most publishers nowadays use a free program called Across Lite, which is very easy to use.

Here's me using Across Lite to make inroads into a CrosSynergy puzzle..

How to Download and Manage
Crossword Puzzles Online

As you can see, there are enough excellent online crossword puzzles around to keep most solvers busy for the best part of the day, seven days a week.

Now, I know you'll think this is a bit lazy of me, but I couldn't help wishing that instead of going and visiting all these sites every day to download my crossword fix, wouldn't it be cool if they all came to me. Perhaps by just pressing a magic button like this...

Well, you can imagine my glee when I discovered that this magic button actually exists! Here's the full screenshot with the result of pressing the magic button just the other day...

It's called Crossword Butler and it's completely FREE (a very reasonable donation is requested, but it's not mandatory). Crossword Butler is available for both Windows and Mac OS X, and is so easy to use that you'll be downloading today's crossword puzzles online in a couple of minutes!

Oh... one more thing. You can download Crossword Butler here.

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