Crossword Clue Answers

What this section is

A crossword clue is a definition in disguise, and the answer is a word that means what the clue says. So these pages start from a dictionary. For each clue we take every word our dictionary records as meaning that thing, or as being a kind of that thing, and group them by length, because the length of your slot is the one thing you always know.

What you get is a candidate list rather than a verdict, plus a note on which candidate a setter usually reaches for and why. That is the honest limit of what a dictionary can tell you: it knows ADO means commotion, and it has no opinion about the fact that a three-square slot clued “commotion” is ADO nine times out of ten. The notes supply that part.

What it is not

It is not a copy of anybody's puzzle. Wordton holds no newspaper's answer key and has never consulted one. Every word on every page below comes from WordNet, a lexical database compiled at Princeton, cross-checked against the 173,000-word list the rest of this site searches, and 381 of them are confirmed by a second reference work as well. Nothing here is derived from a published crossword, and none of these pages will ever tell you what today's answer was in a particular paper.

That limit is also the reason some obvious clues are missing. A clue like “river in France” or “Greek letter” wants a fact rather than a synonym, and a thesaurus cannot supply it. Those pages are absent rather than guessed at.