About Us

OneAcross is dedicated to increasing your enjoyment of language-related puzzles and games. We strive to provide tools that help you do more, get you unstuck, and allow you to finish puzzles of any difficulty.

Our technology is a bit different from many others available today. While many sites also leverage large collections of previous puzzles, or catalog today's exact puzzle answers, we use other sources of information as well, analyzing the language of the clue, then combining all suggestions by reweighting based on how accurate each source has proved to be in the past.

This mathematical approach has it's roots in the origins of the site, through a ground-breaking research project, which introduced the world's first computer program capable of solving American-style crossword puzzles on par with average human solvers.

Beginning in the Fall of 1998, a team of computer scientists at Duke University created a computer program capable of solving tough American-style crossword puzzles. The full system, which ran on a collection of a dozen computers, averaged 98% letters correct on puzzles from USA Today, The LA Times, and The NY Times.

This program, named Proverb (The Probabilistic Cruciverbalist), informally competed in the 1999 American Crossword Tournament and would have placed ahead of 108 of the 255 human participants. The Duke team presented their findings at the annual conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and received the "best paper" award.

Read more about the 1999 competition

Read more about the Proverb research project

We hope you enjoy the site!