Crossword

Crossword by Bill Farmer is a compact word-finding helper, despite its broad name. Enter letters already fixed in an answer, add letters known to occur somewhere, and use blanks for unknown positions. The app searches a bundled dictionary and returns words that fit. It does not supply a crossword grid or interpret clues.

This page covers F-Droid’s 1.26 build. We matched its 0.5 MB APK to F-Droid’s signed index, inspected its single permission and checked the fixed 1.26 source tag. We did not assess the dictionary’s accuracy against a particular newspaper or Scrabble authority.

Finding a crossword entry

The main search works with a local list of about 110,000 words, up to 28 letters long. Known positions remain fixed while a stop or dot represents an unknown character. A second set of letters can require characters somewhere in the result even when their positions are not known. This is useful when crossings have supplied part of an answer but the clue alone is not enough.

Results are possible letter patterns, not solved clues. A word can fit the grid and still be semantically wrong, a proper noun may be absent, and specialist or regional vocabulary depends on what the bundled list contains. You still have to compare the candidates with the clue and crossings.

The app also accepts shared text from another Android app. It can turn a mixture of known letters and blanks into a search pattern, reducing retyping when a puzzle or note app supports sharing selected text.

Separate anagram mode

Anagrams use different bundled data of about 58,000 words. Results are sorted using values derived from Scrabble letter scores. That ordering is a convenience, not a statement that the data is an official Scrabble dictionary. Upstream warns that the anagram algorithm is not comprehensive, so a missing arrangement is not proof that no word exists.

Both data sets are included in the installer, so searches work offline. Tapping a word-search result both fills the answer and opens a definition; there is no tap action that fills it without also opening the definition. The default provider is Wiktionary, which receives the selected word and ordinary connection data. Since version 1.25, the menu can use an installed Aard2 or QuickDic app for offline word definitions. The anagram screen remains fixed to online Wiktionary.

Version, privacy and scope

Version 1.26 opts out of Android 15’s forced edge-to-edge layout for the app’s themes. Upstream does not claim a new dictionary or clue-solving engine in this release.

The APK declares only internet access, used by the definition view. Our static scan found no tracker SDKs, advertising libraries or native code. Search terms remain in the app’s interface unless you deliberately open an online definition; Android’s system backup behaviour is outside the app’s own network path.

The tagged metadata retains older official screenshots rather than a fresh 1.26 set. We omit the obsolete image that showed DuckDuckGo and caption the remaining older interfaces. They should not be mistaken for a playable crossword board, which this utility does not contain.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s source build of 1.26, signed with F-Droid’s key. A differently signed build cannot update it in place.
• The 0.5 MB APK needs Android 5.0 or later and contains no native libraries, so it is not restricted to one CPU architecture.
• Its measured SHA-256 is 3f6c953a3113dc31f3f2f399f8b475513b9b0d7a7b992532bef91118ac1763e3, matching the signed F-Droid index.
• Source-file headers permit GPL-3.0 or later, while F-Droid’s listing says GPL-3.0-only; this page follows the source headers. The included dictionaries are project data; do not assume they are interchangeable with a tournament word list.

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.