TickWords

TickWords turns study material into crossword puzzles for revision. You can scan books and course documents to identify key concepts and generate clues without generative AI. It combines crossword solving with spaced repetition in a relaxed alternative to flashcards, designed for students managing a high workload.

Create revision puzzles

TickWords can extract key terms from educational material and build crosswords around them. For example, you can make a printable puzzle from pharmacology notes, find historical words in a Shakespeare play, identify difficult-to-spell words across your coursework, or create fill-in-the-blank clues from facts in a specification document. You can also make a crossword of obscure terms from a scientific publication to work through before reading it.

Alternatively, you can choose a subject from the educational clue database, set a difficulty level and number of words, and generate a puzzle. TickWords also creates random crosswords on any subject.

Solve and review

You can solve crosswords on screen or print them. Follow-up puzzles use spaced repetition, and you can flag words to revisit in later crosswords. Letter-by-letter hints are available when you need help.

Study materials and content

Automated crossword creation supports PDF, DOCX, ePub, HTML, Markdown, RTF, ODT, LaTeX and TXT files. The clue database contains 2.7 million unique words and terms, with multiple clues for each and 11.4 million possible clues in total. TickWords also includes over 400 pre-made crosswords across 38 subject areas, and changeable backgrounds to suit your study mood.

The game includes 6 hours of study music composed by Joel Steudler: 150 tracks covering lo-fi, piano, acoustic, ambient and zen styles. TickWords runs on your own computer and does not require an AI subscription or cloud compute service.