Crossword clue
Complain crossword clue
35 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "complain", from 3 letters up to 9, grouped below by the length of your slot.
Written by Blake Boege
Answers by length
7 different lengths answer this one. Yours is whichever row matches the squares in the grid.
| Letters | Answers |
|---|---|
| 3 |
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| 4 |
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| 5 |
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| 6 |
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| 7 |
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| 8 |
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| 9 |
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What this list looks like
13 of these are 6 letters, which is more than any other length manages.
The short ones are worth learning: NAG at 3 letters, which is where a setter goes when the grid is tight.
3 of these mean the same as the clue and 32 are kinds of it, which is a distinction worth holding on to when two look equally good.
Which one does the setter mean?
Three squares is NAG. Four gives you BEEF, CRAB and KICK, of which BEEF is the most common in American puzzles. Five squares is usually GRIPE or WHINE.
How these differ
These sort by volume and by sympathy. WHINE, GRIZZLE and BLEAT are the ones that make the complainer sound weak. GRUMBLE, MUTTER and MURMUR are quiet and continuous. GROUSE, GRIPE, BEEF and KVETCH are ordinary and unloaded, KVETCH from Yiddish and now general American. SQUAWK, HOLLER and YAMMER are loud. BEMOAN, BEWAIL, LAMENT and DEPLORE are the formal register and are about grief as much as irritation. REPINE is the most literary here and means to fret quietly over something that cannot be changed.
Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have
Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.
Where these answers come from
No puzzle was consulted to build this page. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “complain” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. Moby Thesaurus lists 20 of them too. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.
Common questions
- What is the answer to the crossword clue "complain"?
- There is more than one. 35 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Three squares is NAG. Four gives you BEEF, CRAB and KICK, of which BEEF is the most common in American puzzles. Five squares is usually GRIPE or WHINE.
- How many letters is the answer to "complain"?
- Anything from 3 to 9. The length with the most candidates is 6. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.
- How reliable are these answers?
- 20 of the 35 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.