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I mean, it claims to “solve clues”. It doesn’t. It just gives the “correct” answer, even when the clues are nonsense.

It seems to make a complete mockery of prize crosswords if anyone can look up the answers before the deadline. I don’t understand why publishers or setters release their answers without also adding a “don’t release before...” date for prize crosswords.

I assumed they had a team of solvers rather than being given the answers.
The site must generate enough traffic to sell advertising space.

It must be some team, as they seem to have answers to most published crosswords as soon as the papers are on sale. I wrote last year to the Herald about the Wee Stinker and Danword. They denied giving the answers and said they could do nothing about Danword.
A mystery!

I had always presumed it was some sort of machine learning based AI that has parsed millions of crossword clues, and matches most likely answers to grids, fitting them all together. I cannot imagine the papers would publish answers. If anyone knows any more would be fascinated to hear. It is certainly not a team, given the speed with which crosswords are solved, I cannot possibly imagine that Danword receives enough traffic to make it profitable - any team with this degree of skill would be pricy & I’d imagine no-one passionate enough to have accumulated the skills would put them to work 1) commercially 2) without provision of explanation to help newbies

There is a business registered at companies house (UK) called the danworld ltd whose sole director is a translator at a company specialising in automated translation from Nordic languages. Registered in 2018, anyone remember danword being around before then? Seems like a likely match, for hopefully obvious reasons I have not included the name.

Thanks, benm10000. I only became aware of Danword about the time when the Wee Stinker was moved to Saturdays; last year?
Very interesting reading.

Interesting discussion. I have stumbled across danword today while researching a clue in the FT's Polymath crossword. Various strands of thought below.

What a strange thing! Not only was I presented with the solution to the clue I was working on, but beneath this was a list of many of the other clues from the same crossword, each presumably with a solution only one click away.

My hunch is that this is some sort of AI process.

This could impact on my approach to crosswords. I cannot reject online research, as I was quite clearly engaging in this to solve "my" clue. I would like to maintain the challenge of hunting down an answer (just as I used to consult a physical atlas or Bible or encyclopaedia), but I feel sure that going to danword is close to cheating. It does take the edge off the challenge, knowing that the answers are only a click away. I suppose that's true for crossword books and quiz books too, but there is something special about a daily newspaper's crossword and the challenge of solving it before the answers are available.

The 2020 accounts were filed at Companies House earlier this month. They contain a profit and loss account (although they do not need to). Turnover in 2020 was £37k against £25k the previous year. After staff costs of £9k (2019: £7k) and tax, the profit for the year was £22k (2019: £14k). This is available for distribution to the shareholder(s) but there's is no sign of dividend payments being made in the period. No assets identifiable, so it doesn't look as if there is investment in hardware or software.

On reflection, I think it is likely that there is no connection between Danword Limited and the danword website. The company seems to be a provider of translation services.

It's certainly eerie that Danword comes up with the answers to Prize puzzles on the day they're published, because they can't mine the blogs or crossword solution pages like they can for daily puzzles. I've never used the site (and don't ever intend to) but have come across it occasionally when, for example, doing a search for an old clue.

Recently, there was this clue in a Times prize puzzle:

In dire straits after reputation collapsed, a first for relatively wealthy area (11,4)

Nobody here, or on Times for the Times a week later when the solution came out, or anywhere else for all I know, managed to parse it satisfactorily. On the day the puzzle came out I did a search in quotes in the hope I'd find the parsing somewhere, or at least an erratum notice. One of the first results was Danword with the correct answer, but no parsing of course.

I can't see that AI could solve this clue because it is almost certainly incorrectly worded, and it can't be in a database because it's never appeared before. That means that either there is a team of solvers or the site has access, authorised or otherwise, to the Times's and other publications' databases.

Spooky!

The AI is aware of the entire grid, so even if the clue is incorrectly worded it can predict the answer based on the enumeration and crossers alone, knowing that the definition is likely to appear at the beginning or end of the clue. In this case the term ‘wealthy area’ and the enumeration with crossers is probably enough. There is another site called ‘crosswordgenius’ which is at least honest about how it works, I suspect danword is the same.