Purpose: A crossword puzzle is one of the common and familiar activities for adults. The purpose of this study was to develop crossword puzzles as a material of auditory training. In the puzzle, words were answers (target) to the puzzle, and all the target words were placed from left to right and from top to bottom in a crossword grid. As an auditory clue of puzzle, either sentence or a series of words was used to help figure out the answer. Based on pilot study, we selected 112 crossword puzzles, consisting of 503 answer-words (target) words, 503 sentence-hints, and 2,515 word-hints. Methods: To verify validity and difficulty of each item, 20 young and 16 older adults were tested. Using the crossword puzzle, the listener was required to hear word hint and sentence hint that could lead to the answers and say their own answers. Results: Results showed that, in general, the target words were more easily solved with sentence clues compared to series of words. For most of the puzzle items, young and older listeners answered the crossword puzzles correctly. Of 112 puzzles, 12 puzzle items showing less than the score of 80% were removed. Consequently, 100 crossword puzzles were selected as a final item, consisting of 452 answer (target) words, 452 sentence-hints, and 2,260 word-hints. Conclusion: Overall, the crossword puzzles developed in this study could be useful for adults regardless of age. Since the crossword puzzle is familiar and entertaining activity, it might better maintain motivation of auditory training compared to conventional training activity of word or sentence repetition. Further research is needed to generate a larger database of puzzle items and also to determine the feasibility of the crossword puzzles into the clinical purpose of aural rehabilitation for the hearing impaired.