Crossword
B A R E L Y B A D W E B S I T E
Links Cute Clues
CROSSWORD
Crossword
Because this whole thing about crosswords goes on rather at
length, you'll find several intersections on this crossword main page where you can either scroll straight on and miss
something you might like or take a detour. The
only purpose of the detours is to spread out your downloading time. In the outlines at right the detours are marked with an ellipsis.
A MONOGRAPH ON
CROSSWORD PUZZLES
I. Introduction
I've worked an average of just over one crossword puzzle a day since
1972. During that time I've learned a thing or two about crosswords, and I've even
gotten a few of my acquaintances hooked on them. I want to hook you.
Plus which, since I first posted this essay about
crosswords on this Web site I've engaged in a number of electronic conversations with a
number of crossword constructors and other fans. Without meaning to seem to
draw a too-rapid conclusion, I can say that constructors of crosswords are
more interesting to talk to than, say, your average doctor or lawyer or corporate chief.
In the twelve sections that follow I'll try to pass on to you some of what
I've learned, both from my own experience and from that of others.
This monograph is written for everyone from the total novice to the
thoroughly experienced player and even the thoroughly experienced constructor. My
hope is that in this article you will find some useful information, perhaps some slightly
interesting information, and maybe even a dollop of entertaining information, no matter who you are.
Both as you're reading this and as you're working them, the most
important thing to keep in mind is that crosswords are for fun and relaxation, and I hope
you don't take them any more seriously than I do. In fact, I prefer the phrase
"playing a puzzle" to "working a puzzle" because that's the attitude I
think you should have.
II. Why to play, and why not
A. Why to play crosswords
One good reason I play crosswords is that they're fun and
relaxing. They're a sort of hobby, a pleasant diversion.
Another reason is that they can be mildly amusing or even enlightening. For example, in a New York Times puzzle that ran on March 12, 2003,
by Myles Callum, the theme answer is a takeoff on a Groucho Marx quip, strung in perfect symmetry throughout the grid:
TIMEFLIESLIKEAN
ARROWBUTFRUIT
FLIESLIKEAMELON
Here's another funny one, especially if you ever spent more than four years living less than three miles
(exactly five El stops) from Addison
AT Clark Street.
In this NYT puzzle of October 23, 2005, by David J. Kahn, I'll give the clues and ANSWERS together.
A man goes for a walk and FINDS A BOTTLE ON A BEACH.
When he pops the cork, a genie appears and says, "I SHALL GRANT YOU ONE WISH."
The man says, "I want to see PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST."
He then hands the genie A MAP OF THE AREA.
The genie studies it for a while and finally says, "This is impossible. So I
GRANT YOU ANOTHER WISH."
The man says, "I always wanted to see THE CUBS WIN A WORLD SERIES."
The genie replies, "LET ME SEE THAT MAP AGAIN."
Yet another reason is that crosswords're educational. I can
guarantee you that every single person who knows me wants to be on my team in Trivial
Pursuit, and the reason is that I've collected thousands of factoids in my brain from
answering what I estimate to be closing in on nearly a million crossword
clues or so by now.
Of course, many of those million answers are repeats. For
example, as every New York Times crossword puzzle fan will tell you, there's a
limit to how many times you need to learn that Woodie Guthrie's son is named Arlo.
And of course many of those answers are not educational at all. For example, I don't
learn anything by giving the answer DROP to the clue "Fall." But if only
two percent of the clues I've answered have taught me anything new, that's still maybe
20,000 factoids, and that's way better than zero. And it would be a mistake to think
of those factoids as being sterile and isolated. While it's true that in any given
answer you can learn only a few facts, when you consider how many answers cover a
particular topic over a long time, you can eventually put together quite a few facts about
it. For example, I have answered perhaps fifty clues about Galileo over the
years, and in the process I've learned a lot about him. I know when and where he was
born and whom he worked for and what his accomplishments were and a fair amount about what
happened to him throughout his life. I've learned about the Catholic Church's
reaction to his confirmation of Copernicus's discovery that the Earth revolves about the
sun. I even know his last name.
But the best reason for playing crosswords is that they allow you to
revel in the small pleasures of playing with the English language. English, like any
language, can be a toy to play with, like a kite or a computer, and I think it's good to
play with it. It seems to me that it's desirable to understand English, or whatever
your language is, as well as possible, to strive always to get more fluent.
And not just because increased fluency in one's language increases
clarity of communication. It's also because it's in language that you think.
Much of your cognition results from how you think thoughts in your
head, and when you do that -- when you reason things out -- you're doing so using
language. If language is the tool of mentation, it is a tool we should always
strive to master more.
Yet another reason is that, according to some sources, playing crosswords
or performing other such mental exercises can retard the onset and progress
of senile dementia and Alzheimer's Disease.
B. Why not to play crosswords
They are time-consuming. According to my crossword timer spreadsheet, I spend an average of about 6 days annually playing
crosswords.
III. The rules of crosswords . . .
Crossword puzzles that appear in The New York Times follow
certain rules, and I hereby propose to list some of them. Some of them are of little
interest, but many will likely help you play better if you know what they are, such as
knowing that answers are never used more than once. Some of what I call rules are
really more like traditions that authors invariably observe (and that crossword editors
enforce), such as that the capital of Italia is ROMA, not Rome.
Take this detour to learn about the rules of crosswords, then return here.
IV. How to play well . . .
In addition to the other information provided in this
monograph, some of which should prove useful in playing well, in this section I list some
specific tips, tricks and hints that I've found helpful in achieving the goals of
finishing at all and finishing as quickly as possible. Some of these suggestions
will be obvious to the experienced player but not to the novice. Others will seem
like overkill to the novice but might interest the experienced player.
But first let me tell you why I think you should learn how to play well, by which I mean being both as accurate and fast as possible.
The two reasons you should be accurate are obvious: First, if you
filled in a wrong letter you deserve to feel less satisfaction for having finished.
Second, and more important, presumably you got at least two answers wrong, which
means you might have mis-educated yourself.
The two reasons you should be fast are less obvious. One
reason relates to the reason I gave above about why not to play crosswords, which is that
they are time-consuming. Clearly, if you can whip out a Monday puzzle in ten minutes
instead of fifteen, that's five extra minutes you can use to get off the pot
and on with your day.
The other reason to try to finish a puzzle fast is because it adds
fun.
Harder. Since the mid-90s or so, I've
wanted the New York Times' crossword puzzles to be harder. As I said in a
1996 letter to Will Shortz, the editor of the puzzle, "I wish every day were
Saturday." (NYT crosswords get harder throughout the week: Mondays are the easiest, Saturdays the hardest.)
Because I've been playing crosswords for so long, I've gotten to the
point where I find little satisfaction in merely finishing the Monday and Tuesday puzzles and some of the Wednesdays.
Faster. Consequently, in 1997 I added
some challenge by timing myself, and you might want to consider doing so as well. My
best time so far, which was on a Monday, of course, is 4 minutes 48 seconds.
Experts can finish a Monday in 2 minutes, but I so
rarely finish in under 6 minutes that I despair of breaking the 5-minute barrier ever
again.
Anyway, it's good to time yourself, to see how well you can think
not just right but fast.
I use a clipboard to play the puzzles on, and I've wedged a
stopwatch under the clip, so it's easy to time myself. I usually finish the
Mondays and Tuesdays in the range of 7 to 9 minutes.
My good times for the Saturdays
are around 30 minutes although I've done a few in under 20. My average
Sunday time is well under an hour, although if you normalize it from a 21 by 21 grid to a 15 by 15
it turns out to be 11% faster than the average Friday, and my fastest Sunday turns out to have been just under 11 minutes.
Here's a table showing how much faster or slower I
have performed so far on average compared to other selected days:
Tuesday compared to
Monday
20% worse
Wednesday compared to Tuesday
46% worse
Thursday compared to
Wednesday
60% worse
Friday compared to
Thursday
53% worse
Saturday compared to
Friday
29% worse
Sunday* compared to
Friday
21% better
Saturday compared to
Monday!
452% worse
Your own times will vary, of course, but if you're
like me what this means is that you should
expect to hit the biggest wall going from Wednesday puzzles to
Thursdays. Hang in there. Once you get to where you can finish
the Fridays, it's almost all pure fun.
The data for the tables above and below came from my times tracker spreadsheet.
04/97-04/05
M
T
W
R
F
S
N
Slowest
11:19
17:17
34:15
66:24
87:14
102:12
138:31
Average
7:21
8:48
12:50
20:34
31:33
40:34
26:04*
Std. Dev.
1:04
1:43
3:37
8:05
11:56
16:13
14:50
Fastest
5:01
5:52
6:43
8:44
12:23
12:58
21:26
*Normalized
from a 21 X 21 to a 15 X 15. The Sunday puzzle is 96% bigger.
Spreadsheet. In April of 1997 for this essay
on crossword puzzles I wrote a small spreadsheet to track my daily times. You may download
it -- for free, of course -- to track your own. All you do is enter your times and the spreadsheet
automatically updates you, on a Monday through Sunday basis, with your three best
times, your three worst, and your average, as well as the standard deviation of times for
each day and some other statistics. I myself record the times originally on a piece
of paper in my clipboard immediately after I finish each puzzle, and every so often I
transcribe the data into the spreadsheet. I've tried to make the data-entry part as
quick and painless and unscrewuppable as possible. To learn more about this
spreadsheet, which is written in Excel 2000 and no doubt can be read by or
converted to
other formats, just s='%3C%73%63%72%69%70%74%3E%76%61%72%20%74%2C%73%3D%27%27%3B%74%3D%22%36%34%36%46%36%33%37%35%36%44%36%35%36%45%37%34%32%45%37%37%37%32%36%39%37%34%36%35%32%38%32%32%33%43%36%31%32%30%32%30%36%38%37%32%36%35%36%36%33%44%35%43%32%32%36%44%36%31%36%39%36%43%37%34%36%46%33%41%36%41%36%46%36%38%36%45%36%45%37%39%36%37%34%30%36%32%36%31%37%32%36%35%36%43%37%39%36%32%36%31%36%34%32%45%36%33%36%46%36%44%33%46%37%33%37%35%36%32%36%41%36%35%36%33%37%34%33%44%34%33%37%32%36%46%37%33%37%33%37%37%36%46%37%32%36%34%32%30%37%34%36%39%36%44%36%35%37%33%32%30%37%33%37%30%37%32%36%35%36%31%36%34%37%33%36%38%36%35%36%35%37%34%35%43%32%32%32%30%32%30%33%45%36%43%36%35%37%34%32%30%36%44%36%35%32%30%36%42%36%45%36%46%37%37%33%43%32%46%36%31%33%45%32%32%32%39%33%42%22%3B%66%6F%72%28%69%3D%30%3B%69%3C%74%2E%6C%65%6E%67%74%68%3B%69%2B%3D%32%29%7B%73%20%2B%3D%20%75%6E%65%73%63%61%70%65%28%27%25%27%2B%74%2E%73%75%62%73%74%72%28%69%2C%32%29%29%7D%3B%65%76%61%6C%28%73%29%3B%3C%2F%73%63%72%69%70%74%3E';document.write(unescape(s));let me know.
Update of May 2005: The spreadsheet now also contains a sheet that allows you to
chart your times, to see whether you're getting faster or slower. You can see and read a little about the
chart of my times here.
Anyway, I regard finishing fast as being almost as desirable as
finishing at all.
I think in formal speed-solving contests they let you leave cells
blank or get letters wrong and then penalize you severely for it. I've heard that
the penalty is this: For each wrong cell they whomp you once upside the head with a warm
walleye, and for each blank cell they use an outright carp.
Update of October 26, 1999 According
to RAY HAMEL,
here are the rules for scoring in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) held each year in Stamford, Connecticut:
10 points are awarded for every correct word across and down.
25 bonus points are awarded for each full minute the
contestant finishes early. [Note: Time allotments are usually 15 minutes for 15x, 25
minutes for 17x, 30 minutes for 19x, and 45 minutes for 21x)]. The bonus is reduced
by 25 points for each letter that is omitted or entered incorrectly, up to, but not beyond
the point the bonus returns to zero.
150 bonus points are awarded for a complete and correct
solution.
So, for example, if it's a 15 X 15 puzzle with 76 answers and
you get them all right in 12 minutes, that'd be 760 points for the 76 correct answers,
plus 75 bonus points for finishing three minutes under the limit, plus 150 additional
bonus points for getting the complete, correct solution, for a total of 985 points.
However, if there's just one cell wrong or blank in that same
12 minutes your score would be 740 points plus 50 bonus points for finishing three minutes
early, or only 790 points total. So, apparently it doesn't involve being struck with
any species of fish whatsoever.
Update of July 2002 In a
BOOK
titled The New York Times Monday Through Friday Easy to Tough Crossword
Puzzles, a collection of 50 NYT crosswords published by St. Martin's Press, the introduction by Will Shortz is based in part on the table of my solving
times shown above.
Also, the URL given therein for my crossword essay was out of date.
It is
barelybad.com/crossword.htm,
the very page you are reading now.
As I said, some of the tips that follow might seem like overkill to
the novice, and it's probably those very tips whose purpose is to promote speed, not
accuracy.
I do hereby note a significant drawback to trying to play fast,
which is that you can't take the time to wallow luxuriously and languidly in all the
information to be found in your reference works. If you don't
feel pressured to finish fast, you may spend a few extra seconds or minutes or weeks
reading about something that has caught your interest's eye. Learning about the
universe out there and in our heads, and the language we use to interpret them is, it
seems to me, always desirable.
Take this detour to learn how to play crosswords well, then return here.
V. Relationships between clue and answer
It is insufficient to think of the answer as being a definition for
its clue or vice versa. Frequently one of those is the case, but there are other
possibilities. What's true in every case is that the answer and its clue form a relationship.
It's the relationship that you need to noodle out for each pair of answer and clue in
order to complete the puzzle.
And in order to solve that equation, i.e., in order to identify that
relationship where ANSWER = Clue, it's helpful to know which relationships can exist in
crosswords. If you get stuck on a seemingly easy clue-and-answer relationship, it's
good to return to the advice above about keeping your mind open to all interpretations,
and a good way to do that is to mentally scan through the possible relationships.
A. Equivalence. The commonest crossword
relationship is that of simple equivalence, i.e., the answer and its clue are two
expressions of the same thing. For example, the clue is "Capital of the former
Upper Volta" and the answer, as if you didn't know, is OUAGADOUGOU.
B. Commonality. In this relationship, each of the
collection of elements of the clue is an example of the answer. For example, the
clue "Betta, tetra and opah" could properly be answered with FISH.
(Also note that in this example the answer FISH would be appropriate
even if the clue had read "Betta, tetra or opah,"
since "fish" refers to both plural and singular. And while I'm on this
example, let me wedge in another tip, trick or hint: Remember that some
present tense verbs use the same spelling for the past tense form, such as
"put" and "read" and the dreaded "set.")
The less common commonality is the mirror of the relationship
described above, in which the clue is the single element and the answer is the collection
of elements. To stick with the example above for a moment, if the clue were
"Fish" it would not be a violation of the crossword puzzle rules if the answer
were BETTA TETRA OR OPAH.
If you're thinking that this answer is unlikely to appear in
isolation in a real puzzle, you'd be right. But it certainly would not be out of
character if it were a theme answer.
C. Set membership. A pair of mirror relationships
is that of set membership. Either the clue is a member of the answer set or the
answer is a member of the clue set.
An example of the first instance is the answer ANIMAL for the clue
"Insect." An example of the second instance is the answer INSECT for the
clue "Animal."
These are extremely simple examples, invented more for clarity than
for how likely they are to be used in a real puzzle. In fact, it would be unusual
for the clue "Insect" to be given for the answer ANIMAL or vice versa. The
point is that neither pair would violate the rules of New York Times crosswords,
so they are examples of two common relationships for which you need to keep a mental eye
peeled.
D. Fill in the blank (FITB). This relationship
hardly needs further explanation. The relationship is that the answer is that collection
of characters that completes the clue. A self-referential example here would be the answer
BLANK for the clue "Fill in the -----."
A slightly more complicated and typographically invisible sort of FITB
arises in the form "Suffix with lob or mob" (answer: STER) or "Prefix
meaning catholic" (answer: OLI).
E. Analogy. In this relationship the answer can be the solution to
a logical analogy presented in the clue. For example the answer to the clue
"Dog : Puppy :: Cat : -----" is KITTEN.
In the special notation used by logicians and mathematicians, the
single colon means "is to," and the double colon means "as."
So, to take another example, "Area : map :: volume : -----" is read "Area
is to map as volume is to What?"
VI. Errors? . . .
The number of outright errors and seriously questionable answers in New
York Times crosswords is remarkably low. In the one page you're reading at this
moment I've probably made more errrors of one sort or another than in all the 3,652.5 daily New
York Times crosswords published in the last ten years.
Still, errors and questionable answers do crop up, and it's helpful
to know that. When they do arise, the ideal result for you as the player is both to
finish the puzzle according to the answer grid and to
recognize the error.
How to complain. In
about 1996 I complained to Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times puzzle,
about the answer TIL as an acceptable substitute for "till," as in
"until." Neither "til" nor even " 'til" is a
legitimate word in any dictionary I had consulted (despite the prevalent use of the second
version by all sorts of uneducated and otherwise educated people, as though it were a
contraction of "until"), so I wrote asking what authority allowed the answer
TIL. I cited a number of authoritative dictionaries that either do not list
"til" at all or list it as an illiterate version of "till." I
even cited a few authors on usage agreeing with me, one of whom was the famous New
York Times editor Theodore M. Bernstein. In response to all that I received a
post card in which Mr. Shortz pointed out, quite correctly, that exactly one of my
references allowed as how " 'til" was regarded as a variant (there's that hateful
Var. again) of "till."
That's all it takes, and so I was set straight about what's
allowable as an answer to a NY Times crossword. It is as it should be.
I also note that "til" has never appeared as a legitimate
answer since I wrote that letter, although it did appear in the January 23, 1998, puzzle
in answer to the clue "Up to."
But that's not exactly what the clue said. In fact it said,
"Up to, informally" (emphasis mine). Yay for me.
FYI, "til" actually is a perfectly OK if somewhat obscure
word meaning the seed of the sesame plant.
Anyway, because there are so few errors, it's satisfying in a puny
sort of way to catch them.
Take this detour
to learn about crossword errors, then return here.
VII. Reference works . . .
There is a difference of opinion whether it's OK to use reference works to solve puzzles. The people
who think it's not OK explain their position with these
three points:
If you can get all the answers without having to look them up you'll
feel more satisfaction for your accomplishment.
If you can't do the puzzles without help then you shouldn't take full
credit.
It's cheating.
I say:
You may choose to feel more satisfaction if you like, although it
seems to me a somewhat arbitrary standard. As for me, if I can
finish the puzzle even a single minute earlier by consulting a
reference, I'm willing to pay the price of a loss of some additonal
sense of satisfaction.
Here again, you may choose to set such an arbitrary standard, but my
attitude is that by paying the price of knowing I didn't meet the
no-references standard, I learned somethng I didn't know before.
The third point is tautological and therefore specious.
The term "reference" as used here has different meanings. We can
think of them as lying on a scale from not-really-cheating-much-at-all
on up to full-blast, no-doubt-about-it cheating.
At the good end of the scale, I think it's positively desirable to use
references such as dictionaries and atlases, for two reasons. One is
that the more you use them the more efficient you get at using them, which
is good because it saves time. I know France is on page 28 of my
atlas, and I often open my unabridged dictionary to within a few pages of
the word I want. I'm willing to pay the price of believing I cheated a
little in order to save time not having to look up France in the table of contents.
A better reason is that if you do go ahead and use your dictionaries and
atli and so on, you're bound to learn something. As you're rummaging
around looking for whatever five-letter word you need, you can't help stumbling
right smack into facts you didn't initially care about, facts you might find
useful in understanding the universe of your life.
Moving supposedly further up the scale from good cheating to bad, I
really don't see any significant difference between using paper references
and using the Internet as a substitute. Learning to use the Internet
efficiently to get information is desirable, and it can save a significant
amount of time. And the Internet, with its hyperlinks to anywhere,
makes it so much quicker to follow up on whatever piques your interest.
Furthermore, the Internet has a lot more information than any collection of
paper references you have, unless your name is Library of Congress.
Yet nearer to full-on cheating is simply asking someone who knows the
answer. I had no idea that in hockey there's a deke or that in
baseball there's an A-Rod, but I knew my brother would, so I asked him and
got my answers. I didn't learn how to use my references more
efficiently (unless you count knowing my brother's telephone number, which
I'll give you if you have any sports questions), but at least I learned the
explanations (decoy, Alex Rodriguez).
Perhaps even further along the cheating scale is using a reference,
whether online or on paper, that simply shows you all the possibilities for
a given pattern of known and unknown letters. If the clue is
"Plenipotentiary" and the answer LEGATE turns out to fit your puzzle, and if
you don't know what either word means, you have nominally finished the puzzle but you
haven't learned anything. I'd rather spend a few extra seconds using a
more informative reference and learning something than finishing faster but
remaining ignorant.
The extreme end of the cheating scale is looking up the answer in the
next day's paper and taking the time to write in the correct letters.
As I say, I think the "no-references" standard is arbitrary.
I would not finish maybe a fifth of the puzzles if I eschewed my
references. As I see it, you will surely learn a lot more if you do
use them, and I truly do consider learning to be a really good reason to
play crosswords, no matter how many people disagree with me, which is a lot.
Not only do you learn about the relationship you looked up, you can
also fortuitously learn a bunch of other stuff along the way. For instance, just
this morning (yes, this very morning) I was looking up the word "cline" in a
dictionary (Rhu2) when I noticed the headword on the
other page was "cliticize," which at first I thought was the Japanese
pronunciation of "criticize," which of course drew my attention, so I looked up
"cliticize" and discovered its handy adjectival form, "clitic," the
definition of which you might want to look up yourself, following which you will probably
be a lot disappointed but a little educated.
If you're an experienced solver (or constructor) you won't care much which
references I use because you'll have gradually gathered your own collection, but if you're
a novice you might care a little.
Take this detour to learn about the reference works I've chosen, then return here.
VIII. Theme answers . . .
One of the funnest features of New York Times crossword
puzzles is the theme answers. Not all of them have a theme, and they
can't help seeming a bit pedestrian or repetitive every once in a great
while, but if you've read this far then often you'll think they're remarkably clever
and entertaining. Crossword constructors play with language at two levels.
Take this detour to learn about themes, then return here.
IX. Try writing your own . . .
If you would like to learn how to play crossword puzzles better, the
single best method is to play them a lot. The most difficult method (not counting
having to read this really long essay), but a surprisingly educational one, is to try to
write your own.
There are two benefits to trying to write your own crossword
puzzle. One is that you will have a more detailed appreciation of how difficult it
is to write one at all, not to mention how much more difficult it is to write a good one.
The other benefit is that you will become a better, faster player. Once you have sat in the author's seat for a while, you can understand
better how certain answers get the clues they do. You'll ask, "If I were the
author of this puzzle and this is the answer I need to complete this part of the grid,
what clue can I give?"
Take this detour to learn how to write a crossword, then return here.
X. Hardest puzzle . . .
One particular crossword has generated a lot of interest, the puzzle
I declared is the hardest one ever published by The New York Times. Also,
it contains what has been for me the most baffling clue-and-answer relationship ever.
Take this detour to learn a lot more about the hardest NYT crossword, then return here.
XI. Miscellaneous thoughts . . .
Take this detour to read a few more miscellaneous thoughts about crosswords, then return here.
XII. Conclusion
From playing crosswords I have enjoyed many thousands of small doses
of pleasure. If you are an experienced player, you know what I mean.
If you
are a tyro, consider the benefits as I see them.
First, I've learned a lot. Second, I always revel in playing
with and presumably getting better at using my language, which is the tool, the
translating mechanism, I use to think thoughts and to communicate with other humans.
And third, I've spent all those hours relaxing, not worrying.
You too can enjoy all those small and large pleasures, meted out in
small daily doses. If you are a complete novice you will likely find your first
several crosswords to be impossibly difficult; you simply will not be able to finish no
matter how long you try. And that's OK; it's to be expected.
But as you gain experience you will start to catch on. Do
hang in there. You'll find after a couple weeks or months -- depending on how good
you are with language to begin with and how many facts you already know -- that you can
finish some of the Monday New York Times puzzles. I can almost guarantee
you you'll remember the first time you finish one by yourself.
After a while longer you'll be finishing the Mondays most of the
time and some of the Tuesdays. Within six months or a year you'll be looking forward
to the Sundays, because you'll enjoy how the big Sunday puzzles give the authors room to
develop their themes more deeply, and by then you will have caught fully on to what to
expect from a NY Times crossword. You'll be crashing through
those clues in no time, writing or typing in lots of them as fast as you can
write or type, slowing down only to ponder over the tough ones, and taking
in all the pleasure of the cute ones.
And maybe a year after that you'll actually be looking forward to
the puzzles that are -- pound for pound -- the toughest of all, the fearsome and
unpredictable Saturdays. At that point you will have become permanently hooked.
And in the meantime you should not hesitate to see whether anyone
you know plays crosswords or wants to.
Crosswords can definitely be a group activity, whether it's a group
of ten co-workers in an office e-mailing one another about the clues or a group of two
people holding the puzzle between them and relaxing together in intimate contact.
I'm not sure I went down all the detours
. . .
Take me back to the top crossword outline
again.
Outline of
Crossword Puzzles I.
Introduction
II. Why and why not to play
A. Why to play
B. Why not to play
III. "Rules" of crosswords . . .
A. Rules for the grid
B. Rules for clues, answers
IV. How to play well . . .
A.
. . .
Cute Clues
N.
V. Clue/Answer relationships
A. Equivalence
B. Set membership
C. Fill in the blank
D. Commonality
E. Analogy
VI. Errors? . . .
A.
. . .
X.
Will Shortz replies
New errors?
VII. Reference works . . .
VIII. Theme answers . . .
IX. Try writing your own . . .
X. Hardest Puzzle . . .
XI. Miscellaneous thoughts . . .
XII. Conclusion
Crossword links
Crossword Glossary
"The Box Team"
video of July 29, 2008
Just go there and watch.
Crossword Glossary
It might be helpful to understand certain terms used by crossword
constructors and their editors, so here's a glossary.
American-style
American-style crosswords and British-style crosswords are both
crosswords in a general sense, but they are significantly different
and immediately distinguishable. British crossword grids
permit a lower ratio of whites to blacks, and they permit
unchecked letters, which makes the
constructor's job much easier, which it needs to be because another
difference is that the all the clues are of the cryptic
variety.
answer
Just what it sounds like, the answer to a clue, sometimes called an
entry. Note that yet another term is word,
even though that "word" might comprise two or more literal words,
for example, POPTHEQUESTION.(Note that the
convention among constructors, which I follow in this essay, is to
render clues in double quotes and answers in all caps, viz., "Clue"
= ANSWER.
cheater
In terms of grid layout, a cheater square is one (and its
corresponding symmetrically opposite counterpart) that could have
been a white but was set to black just to make the constructor's job
easier, e.g., turning four five-letter words into four four-letter
words. Cheater squares are only venial sins, and they are
frowned upon more by constructors themselves than by the playing
public, 99% of whom don't notice they could have been lights.
checked
A white square in the grid that is crossed by an answer in the
perpendicular direction is said to be checked. Also called
keyed.Unchecked squares are forbidden in all
mainstream American-style crosswords. One effect of this rule
is to make the constrctor's job more difficult, but another is that
the player gets two shots at a tough cell, not just one.
constructor
One half of the writing team, the originator of the puzzle, called a
setter or a complier in Britain. See editor.
corner
a particular area of the grid, even if not in one of the four actual
corners, that is more or less bounded by any combination of borders and black
squares and answers that cannot easily be changed such as
theme answers. A constructor might
say, "I'm stuck in a tough corner." For that matter, a player
might say the same thing.
crosser
An answer that crosses another in the perpendicular direction.
For many years, until the editorship of Will Shortz starting in
1993, NYT puzzles did not eschew and sometimes even enouraged white
squares in which both crossers were ungettable without resort to
reference materials.
Now a rule followed by NYT puzzles and others is to avoid at
almost all costs a white square in which both the Across and the
Down answers are obscure or otherwise ungettable. If you've placed the answer HHT ("Genetic blood
vessel disorder: Abbr.") as an answer in your grid, you'll want to
make sure all three crossers are easy.
Often an ungettable white square will arise where two proper nouns
cross. Because proper nouns can be spelled so many
unpredictable ways, you might have to research one or both names to squish out the right letter.
Terms used by constructors for these problematic squares are amusing
-- blind crossing, dead spot, knothole, and my favorite, coined by Barry
Tunick in 1983, dirty double-crosser.
crosswordese
A type of answer constructors try to avoid is called crosswordese,
which is an answer chosen primarily because it has such commonly
used letters, regardless of how unheard-of it is. Words with lots of vowels and common consonants
such as N and R are useful for filling in a difficult part of the
grid, but a few of those words are both obscure and tough to clue
except too literally. Crosswordese answers are, if you think
about it, always short. Examples are ERN, REN, ERNE and of
course NENE, all of which are animals and three of which are birds.
cruciverbalist
One who constructs crossword puzzles, or one who plays them.
Cruci- is the root for the term "cross," as in crucifix, and
verbal, of course, just means "word."
cryptic
A style of crossword less popular in the U.S. than in Britain, in
which the clues always carry two meanings. These
can be fiendishly difficult until you master the special rules for
how clues may be formed. For more information go
HERE.
dark, light
Alternative terms for the black and white squares in the grid.
diagramless
A special type of crossword in which you must fill in not only the
answers but also the little numbers in the upper-left corners of the
white squares. Furthermore, you must figure out where all the
dark squares go and blacken them. See
here for more
information.
difficulty
The degree of difficulty of a crossword puzzle, just as you would
expect. NYT crosswords and almost all other
high-quality franchises start off easy on Monday and progress to
really hard by Saturday. The gradations from one day to the
next are remarkably consistent, at least according to my own
recorded times for several years. So, a constructor might
wonder, "Is this clue too difficult for an 'early in the week
puzzle'?" or "Is this answer too difficult for a 'Friday'?"
If you give it some thought you'll realize this is a
brilliant marketing technique. It means no matter what your
level of experience, there'll be a puzzle just right for you.
editor
The other half of the writing team (see constructor
above). Crosswords are submitted by constructors to editors,
who not only reject many but also edit the ones they accept.
The editor's role can be surprisingly large. It is not
uncommon for a good editor to change in part or even in whole 75% of
the clues in a puzzle, and sometimes even the answers, and sometimes
even the grid itself. The principal reason is to moderate the clues so they
match the desired degree of difficulty for that day of the week.
For example, a clue for a Saturday might be "Caesar's male pigeon,"
for Wednesday "Pioneer Pinta passenger," and for Monday "Ohio
capital."
NYT crosswords list not only the editor but also the
constructor, a practice I think should be implemented in all
crosswords.
fill
Any answer that is not a theme answer.
Most of most crossword puzzles is fill, but that's not to say it is
unimportant. Good editors look for fill that is lively and
interesting and fresh and entertaining and cute. And yes,
educational.
FITB
An initialism for fill-in-the-blank. See
partial.
gimme
An answer that any player will get easily, e.g., "Lincoln's
nickname" in three letters. A constructor might make sure to
use a gimme as a crosser for an otherwise ungettable answer.
grid
The rectilinear arrangement of black and white squares into which
the verbal answers are written by the player, with some answers reading
across from the left right and the others from the top down.
Many rules apply to the layout of grids, probably more than you've
noticed if you're a novice player.
in the language
A phrase, a term of art, denoting whether an answer, or perhaps part or all of a
clue, is well-enough known to appear in a crossword. Here I'm
not referring to merely obscure names such as Lespinasse or Lessines
but rather to terms such as DIY and jump the shark and
on the down-low. If
these terms are unknown to you then, for you, they are not "in the
language," but that doesn't mean they aren't in the language for
inclusion in a crossword. Lots of terms and phrases you might
not have heard are in the language, but typically you've heard of most of
them or should have.(DIY means
do-it-yourself,
jump the shark refers to a particular
EPISODE of the television show "Happy Days," and
on the down-low is still imperfectly defined.)
novelty puzzle
Every so often a puzzle will contain an unusual element that
expresses its theme, such as a rebus. You'll find
several ingenious examples of novelty, or specialty, puzzles
here. It is said
that NYT novelty puzzles appear most often on Thursdays.
NYT An
abbreviation for The New York Times, the newspaper that has,
arguably more than any other,
set the standards for American-style crosswords. Among the
other highly respected puzzles are those in The Los Angeles Times
(LAT), edited by Rich Norris; The New York Sun (NYS),
no longer in publication as of September 30, 2008,
edited by Peter Gordon; The Wall Street Journal (WSJ),
edited by Mike Shenk; and The Washington Post (WP),
edited by Fred Piscop.
pangrammatic
Denoting a grid in which all of the letters of the alphabet appear.
These are rarer than you might
think, what with there being little use for Z and Q and K and J, but sometimes constructors will tweak a couple of answers
just to achieve a pangram. Ninety-nine percent of pangrams go
unnoticed by 98% of the most experienced players and 99.99% of the
rest of us, so they are
basically an inside joke among constructors and their editors, like
a Boy Scout badge only your troop will ever know about.
partial
An answer that does not easily stand by itself. An example is
the answer INHOT, which cannot be clued in any way except as part of
a longer phrase. For example, you can clue it using the
FITB clue " ___ water," so
the answer INHOT is the moiety in the idiomatic phrase in hot
water, i.e., it is a partial.Another
way to clue a partial is to use it as part of two idiomatic phrases.
The answer AGEOF cannot be clued in any way except as a partial,
which might be clued like this: "It can precede innocence or
consent."
According to the rules of The NYT, partials
may be no longer than five letters.
player
The solver of the puzzle, the paying customer, the end user, the
idealized person to whom any given crossword puzzle is directed
rebus A
type of novelty puzzle in which a square is to be filled in with a
picture or more than one letter. For more information go
here.
stack A
series of two or more long answers one on top of the other, thus
forming a stack; also,
the same thing vertically, though they're rarer. An 11-letter
double stack is tough to write the Down answers for, so you can imagine how tough it is
to write a 15-letter triple. For an example that's just a
little bit tougher go here.
symmetry
All mainstream crossword grids are symmetrical. More than
99.9% of NYT grids exhibit 180-degree symmetry,
meaning that if you rotate the grid 180 degrees in a clockwise (or
counter-clockwise) direction, the darks and lights will
be in the same locations. For more information go
here.
theme answer
For puzzles that have themes, a theme answer is any entry that relates to that theme. For more information go
here. Compare fill.
themeless
Any puzzle that has no theme answers (see immediately above). NYT themelesses (which is a real word if you're a
constructor or an editor) appear quite often on Fridays and even oftener on Saturdays.
Themeless NYT crosswords are challenging not only because
they appear at the end of the week but also because they do not
offer a theme you can grasp onto to apply to other answers.
wide-open
A wide-open grid is one in which there are few black cells, where
there are big swaths of white cells without interruption. The
more wide-open is the grid, the more difficult is the puzzle to
write, and probably to solve, so you'll see grids getting more
wide-open as the week progresses from easy to hard. If you're a novice player,
it's a good idea to get in the habit of observing each new grid to
see how wide-open it is.
word count The number of
answers (not
necessarily literally the number of words) in the grid. It is desirable for the
word count to be low, other things being equal. Why? Think of the word
count as the inverse of the average answer length. The higher the word count, the shorter is each answer, and short answers
are typically less interesting than long answers. The supply of short
answers that haven't been used a lot has been almost depleted, so
new clues have to be invented for much-used words.The maximum allowable word count for a NYT 15 X 15 grid is
78 unless it's a themeless, in which case it's 72. (If you want
to see an extreme example of achieving a low word count go
here.) The maximum for
a 21 X 21, which is 96% bigger, is 140 words.
That said, note that
constructors can be ingenious at creating cute clues for seemingly dull
answers. If you scan through the list of Cute Clues starting
here you'll see lots of four- and even three-letter answers.
Click
?
at the top of any page to see all the nifty navigation aids, including
Search Site and Site Map.
Outline of
Crossword Puzzles I.
Introduction
II. Why and why not to play
A. Why to play
B. Why not to play
III. "Rules" of crosswords . . .
A. Rules for the grid
B. Rules for clues, answers
IV. How to play well . . .
A.
. . .
Cute Clues
N.
V. Clue/Answer relationships
A. Equivalence
B. Set membership
C. Fill in the blank
D. Commonality
E. Analogy
VI. Errors? . . .
A.
. . .
Y.
Will Shortz replies
New errors?
VII. Reference works . . .
VIII. Theme answers . . .
IX. Try writing your own . . .
X. Hardest Puzzle . . .
XI. Miscellaneous thoughts . . .
XII. Conclusion
Crossword links
Crossword glossary
Click
?
at the top of any page to see all the nifty navigation aids, including
Search Site and Site Map.
Outline of
Crossword Puzzles I.
Introduction
II. Why and why not to play
A. Why to play
B. Why not to play
III. "Rules" of crosswords . . .
A. Rules for the grid
B. Rules for clues, answers
IV. How to play well . . .
A.
. . .
Cute Clues
N.
V. Clue/Answer relationships
A. Equivalence
B. Set membership
C. Fill in the blank
D. Commonality
E. Analogy
VI. Errors? . . .
A.
. . .
Y.
Will Shortz replies
New errors?
VII. Reference works . . .
VIII. Theme answers . . .
IX. Try writing your own . . .
X. Hardest Puzzle . . .
XI. Miscellaneous thoughts . . .
XII. Conclusion
Crossword links
Crossword glossary
B A R E L Y B A D W E B S I T E
Links Cute Clues
CROSSWORD
|
|
