Cruciverbalist

Cruciverbalist is a freeware/shareware crossword program for the classic Mac OS that doubles as both a solver for published puzzles and a fully featured construction tool for creators - a true cruciverbalist's workbench. This Info-Mac release ships the PowerPC build.

Solving

Players can solve the program's bundled Cruciverbalist puzzles as well as crosswords published online by the New York Times, USA Today, and other newspapers. The viewer surfaces candidate words from the bundled lists so solvers can study patterns and improve their game against traditionally published puzzles.

Construction

Constructors can generate custom grid layouts, build newspaper-quality puzzles from scratch, and add or remove words in their own personal word lists. The package ships an extensive word list of nearly 80,000 words, names, and phrases, plus several sample puzzles to dissect.

System requirements

Cruciverbalist requires System 7 and a Mac Plus or later CPU. Both 68K and PowerPC native builds were released; this archive entry is the PowerPC version. Documentation covers solving, fetching puzzles from the internet, word-list maintenance, puzzle creation, and customisation.

Provenance

Description compiled from the Info-Mac BinHex header for cruciverbalist-ppc.hqx. The author's original support page was hosted at members.aol.com/westpolesf/cruciv.html (long offline). No Macintosh Garden page for this exact slug was located at fetch time.