French Crossword Puzzles - Mots fléchés

Mots fléchés are French crossword puzzles which provide clues within the puzzle itself, rather than in a list on the side. You can print out free mots fléchés to get a bit of challenging - and fun! - French practice every day.

I enjoy doing mots fléchés with my morning coffee while listening to a French radio station or CD. Not only is it a way to immerse myself in French for an hour or so, but I often learn new vocabulary and expressions (some of which, you may notice, then become mots du jour).

I start out by answering the questions I can figure out on my own, and then I use the internet and my French dictionary software for help with others. For example, in a recent mots fléchés, the clue for one three-letter response was "Quand le bât blesse !" I know that bât means "packsaddle" and that C'est là où le bât blesse means "There's the rub," so I looked up "there's the rub" and found three other ways to say it:

• C'est là la difficulté
• C'est là que gît le lièvre
• Voilà le hic - and voilà the answer (or so I thought)

When I've done all I can I put the puzzle away until the next day, when I print out the current puzzle and use the answer key to fill in one or two responses to see if they allow me to get any others. Then I copy the rest from the answer key (in the hopes of learning something that will help with a future puzzle), throw away the old puzzle, and start on the new.


Printing Mots fléchés

Go to the MetroPoint site and choose a date and a city (I'm partial to Toulouse :-) The newspaper will open in Adobe Reader. Scroll down to the page with the mots fléchés and adjust the view so that you can see the current puzzle and previous day's answers (this now requires that you rotate the page 90 degrees. Click print then choose "print current view."

Visit the forum to ask for help with tricky clues: Mots fléchés discussion