The Atlantic Crossword

About The Atlantic Crossword

The Atlantic started its daily online crossword in September 2018, decades after the magazine's monthly print puzzle, The Atlantic Puzzler, which ran from 1977 to 2006. The daily is made by Caleb Madison, who began selling crosswords to the New York Times while at Yale and later became The Atlantic's director of games.

The idea is a puzzle that grows. Monday's grid is mini sized and takes a couple of minutes, and every day after that adds a little size and difficulty, so by the weekend you are working a full grid with harder clues. That makes it a good bridge between a five by five mini and a full newspaper crossword.

You solve in the browser with a timer and can check or reveal a letter, a word or the whole grid. In 2025 the magazine added more games around it, including Caleb's Inferno, a subscriber crossword that gets harder as you go down. The few most recent daily crosswords stay free, while the full archive needs an Atlantic subscription.

It suits people who like a mini but want a bit more by the end of the week, and solvers who enjoy a conversational, current clue style.

How to play The Atlantic Crossword

1. Open the crossword page and choose today's puzzle.
2. Click a square or a clue to select an answer and type it in.
3. Use the arrow keys or Tab to move between squares and clues.
4. Use check or reveal for a letter, word or the whole grid if you get stuck.
5. Fill every square correctly to stop the timer.

Tips

• Play from Monday on to warm up as the grid grows through the week.
• Save Sunday for when you have time; it is the biggest and hardest puzzle of the week.
• On small grids, fill every down answer you are sure of first; each one gives you a letter in several across answers.
• Clues with a question mark are usually wordplay, so read them twice.
• Play within a few days if you do not subscribe, since only the latest puzzles are free.

Questions