15 crossword solvers for Android, iOS, and the web that actually work

Crossword puzzles are excellent brain teasers. The easy ones take a few minutes, while the most complicated ones can take days. It’s a perfect way to learn new things, and it’s one of the most popular word puzzles in the world. As it turns out, we sometimes bite off more than we can chew. There are many apps and websites to help when you’re entirely stumped. Here are the best crossword solvers for Android, iPhone, iPad, and the web that work. You should be able to solve those crosswords pretty quickly with these.

Of course, we also recommend something like Google Assistant or Google Search (Google Play) since you can, in fact, Google many crossword questions and get answers or something close to the solution.

The best crossword solvers on all platforms

What makes a good crossword helper?

There are dozens of websites and apps that work for this. However, the vast majority are relatively simple. The best ones include modern references and potentially even pop culture solutions, along with the usual stuff. Every app and site on this list can do the basics and at least a little extra. Additionally, all the crossword solvers on this list are free, free with ads, or have a single premium cost. There are no subscriptions here!
Given how much information can change and how many new solutions are available weekly with new crosswords, it’s impossible to keep up with everything. However, most of these apps should work on most clues.
For the iOS section of this list, all the apps should work on both iOS and iPad unless otherwise specified.

Android crossword solvers

Anagram Solver

Price: Free / $3.99

Anagram Solver does two different things. It solves anagrams, and it also helps with crossword puzzles. It supports blank spots, so you can look for almost any word as long as you know at least part of it. Additionally, the app has word definitions, various hints and tips, and some additional features. It’s a relatively simple app that works as both an anagram solver and a crossword puzzle solver.

Crossword Clue Solver

Price: Free

Crossword Clue Solver can help solve a crossword in two different ways. The first is a search via the clue. You type in the hint to get some ideas. The other way is similar to how most of these crossword solvers work. You input the letters you know and periods for the notes you don’t, and the app guesses words from there. It uses an online database, so there is no offline support. Otherwise, the app is free and supported by ads.

Crossword Solver by Havos 

Price: Free / In-app purchases ($0.99 – $3.49 per item)

Crossword Solver is an unimaginative name, but it seems to work well. The app boasts just under 200,000 proper nouns and basically every word in the dictionary. That should help find more stuff than usual. Additionally, there are various filters to reduce the list of possibilities, five puzzle-solving modes, and even some foreign language words. The UI looks ancient, but it’s easy enough to use. This app’s pro version seems to do much better than the free version, so keep that in mind if you try the free version first.

Crossword Solver by LithiumApps 

Price: Free

Crossword Solver by LithiumApps is one of the newer crossword solvers on the list. It has quite a decent set of features, including over 400,000 words, offline support, and an anagram solver on top of the crossword solver capabilities. You can also find word definitions and audio pronunciations if you need those. The UI is simple enough, even if it doesn’t look overly impressive. It also supports blank or unknown letters. It works offline for most of its functions, but you need the Internet to look up definitions.

Crossword Solver King

Price: Free / $3.99

Crossword Solver King is another one of the more competent crossword solvers. It comes with over 280,000 words available offline. Additionally, it supports missing letters, solves anagrams, and has a bunch of filters to help narrow your searches. It also integrates with this English Offline Dictionary for even more offline functionality. It worked well enough in our tests and is actually the same developer as Anagram Solver. The pro version removes ads, lowers the needed permissions to zero, and more.

iPhone and iPad crossword solvers

Across Lite Crosswords (iPad only)

Price: Free with in-app purchases

Across Lite Crosswords is an iPad app for crossword fans. It features an exceptionally advanced solver, along with some actual crossword puzzles. There are a variety of filters, blank letter support, and other tools to help you narrow things down as much as possible. Additionally, the app supports left- and right-handed folks and some other neat features. You can use it as a solver, but the developer says it may not work for crosswords that aren’t Across Lite formatted.

Anagram Solver

Price: Free 

Anagram Solver is primarily for solving anagrams and for games like Words With Friends and Scrabble. However, one of the features includes crossword solvers along with some features. It has over 280,000 offline words, multi-word support, blank letter support, and filters for refining search results. The crossword solver is mostly just an extension of the anagram solver with support for more blank letters. Thus, you probably won’t be able to use this alone. Still, it’s pretty good at what it does.

The Crossword & Anagram Solver

Price: Free / $0.99-$2.99

The Crossword & Anagram Solver is not the most unique name, but it’s an effective app. It works very much like the Anagram Solver above. You enter your letters along with the blank spaces and get a bunch of potential word matches. The app also supports anagram unscrambling iOS Dark Mode, and you can see word definitions. The anagram stuff requires a $1.99 in-app purchase, or you can get it and remove ads for a single $2.99 payment. Like Anagram Solver above, it’s a valuable tool, but it probably won’t find every answer you might need.

Crossword Solver

Price: Free / $4.99

Crossword Solver is a simple, basic app. It’s by Havoc, the same developer of the Android app above. Thus, it has a lot of the same features. That includes over 200,000 proper nouns, places, movies, books, songs, and other pop culture references. Additionally, 150,000 synonyms support blank or missing letters, including support for English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and, surprisingly, Latin. It doesn’t work well with puzzle clues but can help you fill in the blanks with the best.

Crossword Clue Solver

Price: Free

Crossword Clue Solver is one of the few iPhone and iPad crossword solvers that works with clues. You can type in parts of the clue to see various words, and it still does the word search with missing letters like all others. The UI is clean and efficient, which means the app doesn’t have many extra features. It gets the job done, though, and it’s free to download.

Website crossword solvers

Crossword Heaven

Price: Free

Crossword Heaven is an excellent, if simple, website for crossword solving. The app links crosswords from the Washington Times, New York Times, LA Times, and USA Today. We assume it tunes its crossword solver to those specific crosswords. The website is easy to use, with simple banner ads that never intrude. You can search by clue and input the parts of the answer you know with support for blank spaces. It’s a good, simple site overall.

Crossword Solver

Price: Free

Crossword Solver is another simple website that helps you quickly fill in the blanks. This one also works well as an anagram solver if you need one. You choose how many letters the word has and fill in the letters you already know. The website then gives you a list of potential words. Using the tabs toward the top, you can also use the Clue Database section to look up clues, although this was hit-and-miss in our experience. It’s a solid, competent website for some quick crossword help.

Dictionary.com

Price: Free

Dictionary.com has much more than dictionaries, as we were surprised to discover while researching this article. It has a whole section on the official website for word games, including a Words With Friends and Scrabble cheat section and a couple of crossword solvers. You input the clue and tell the engine the known letters. It then tries to guess from there, along with a percentage of how sure the site is about its answer. It’s a little bit fussy until you get used to it. For instance, it doesn’t know that Pet Cematary’s author was Stephen King until I added a couple of known letters from his name. So it takes some work, but it does work with clue searches if you’re patient enough.

Google Search

Price: Free

We realize that Google Search is a laughably obvious answer, but that doesn’t make it suddenly wrong. You can look up many pop culture references, clues, and other tidbits to help yourself. It’s also great for weirdly vague hints and obvious ones you can’t remember. Of course, you can use Google Search to find other crossword solvers for any platform. We used it rather heavily while looking for potential entrants for this list.

Wordplays

Price: Free

Wordplays is a decent site for crossword solvers and anagram solvers. It works better than average, although we wish it had better pop culture support. You enter keywords from the clue and the letters you know to see a list of potential answers. Additionally, the site lets you take a solution and search for clever clues for crossword sculptors. It should work immensely well for more straightforward answers and most non-proper nouns.

If we missed any great crossword solvers, tell us about them in the comments! You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists!

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