I’ve been doing a ton of crosswords during lockdown. I still can get almost nowhere with the Thursday-Saturday NYT puzzles. Will I just ‘get it’ after continuing to plug away? I seem to do much better with the LA Times, regardless of dates. I’m also using puzzles from a variety of years, my daily crossword NYT calendar has featured mostly 2016 puzzles and I’ve got a variety of books as well.
Sundays are hit and miss, depends if I figure out the theme and there’s not too many long clues with 1965 Tony Award winners or something similar.
I am no expert, but if you are stuck I say there is no shame in using a Crossword Puzzle Dictionary or google.
If you look up Chief Justices enough times you will remember them.
Yeah, look things up.
No one needs to know. I don’t have a crossword puzzle dictionary anymore but I ain’t ashamed to Google something. To, you know, check spelling;).
This is a weird thing. I didn’t get my paper for several days. For some reason they didn’t run an edition for those days. When I finally got a paper it had 6 crossword puzzles in it. I was in hog heaven:).
Quite possibly yes. But it may take a while. “During lockdown” is a lot shorter time frame than some people have been doing lots of crosswords. And if some are still too hard for you, that’s a good thing: you wouldn’t want to get to a point where nothing can challenge you any more, right?
Here’s a pretty typical entry from a crossword I just did: “Apple variety.” The answer is IMAC (as in, the computer)
To me, this illustrates two of the advantages of having lots of experience with crosswords.
One is, you get familiar with the vocabulary that crossword constructors tend to use over and over—the kind of short, vowel-heavy words that they rely on—to where you almost expect there to be an OREO or an ERA or an EDEN in every puzzle. If I didn’t do crosswords, I probably would never think about the iMac; but I’ve encountered it enough in puzzles that it sprang to mind readily.
The other advantage is that you get used to looking at more than one possible interpretation of clues. When you see a phrase like “Apple variety,” you probably think first of a kind of fruit. But of course, that’s not the only thing that “Apple” can refer to, and an experienced crossword solver has learned to think, “What else could this mean?”
With any but the easier puzzles, you can’t just think, “What is the answer to this clue?” You have to think “What possible answer to this clue fits in with the letters that are already in the grid?” There may be a few clues that have one single obvious right answer, and I usually look for one of those to use as a starting point when solving. But then I do a lot of working back and forth, using both the clues and the letters that I’ve already entered to narrow things down. (Apologies if this is already obvious to you, but it seems to me that it’s one thing that new crossword solvers have to learn.)
Mostly what you will learn from doing a lot of puzzles is the list of words that are commonly used because they are useful to crossword puzzle makers. Keanu (Reeves) appears frequently, for example, I suppose for the unusual sequence of letters. If you see a clue for a 5-letter word and the clue is “Actor Reeves” the answer is never “Steve.”
There is also a knack which I suppose gets polished with use, of recognizing words or strings of words from just a few letters, sort of like Wheel of Fortune. This can help a lot with longer words. Also recognizing patters of letters that are common, like “ing” at the end of a word, or what letters are likely to come before or after a consonant.
When you are stuck, put the puzzle aside for a while and come back to it later. When you have been staring at a puzzle for a while it gets hard to see any new possible answers (similar to functional fixedness, but not quite the same). When you are more fresh, new possible answers will come up.
When you are well and truly stuck, go ahead and look at the answer, but don’t just write it in and forget it, think about the relationship between the clue and the answer, and maybe something like it will come up again.
I do the New York Times crossword puzzles, from Sunday through Friday. (I skip Saturdays, which is the hardest one.) Thursdays often feature a “gimmick” and once you get that, the rest of the puzzle is easier. As for looking stuff up, I do. One thing to keep in mind is that the words recur, so once you look up something you didn’t know, you may remember that for next time.
I used to be done as of Wednesday. Now I can usually muddle through the entire week, with occasionally having a total brain fart on a particularly difficult puzzle. It’s just persistence over time. Putting it aside and coming back to it later is a really good suggestion. I can usually pick up a puzzle after a half hour break and immediately see a half dozen answers that had me flummoxed.
The end of week NYT puzzles are definitely among the hardest out there. I’ve been doing crossword puzzles for 40 years and it took 10 to 15 years of regular solving before I could finish those regularly.
A lot of it is that after solving lots and lots of puzzles one gets to recognize many of the tricks and common answers.
Will Shortz was once asked whether looking up answers in a dictionary or Google is cheating. He said it’s your puzzle, so you can solve it however you want, as long as you have fun.
Ironically, I’m doing the Saturday puzzle right now. The upper left corner has me stymied at the moment, but I’ve knocked out the rest of it. It’s taken me an hour so far.
Crossword puzzle books are great, but you can’t find good ones in any brick and mortar store. I send away for books with Sunday puzzles from the NY Times, LA Times, Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune (I think). So if you can quietly steer them to thinking that far in advance, maybe you’ll get one you like.
About once every couple weeks I’ll scan Amazon to see if there’s any at a particularly low price. I agree that the typical newsstand ones are just ridiculously easy.
Crossword puzzle books have the advantage of being thrown away when done, so I don’t have to worry about permanently adding to a hard copy book collection. I do find it odd people sell used crossword books. I assume they’re books in which a few are done or attempted but still. Crossword books aren’t exactly expensive to begin with.
I definitely put them away and come back later.
In factc I started doing crosswords when I had a job scoring standardized tests, there was a lot of downtime, this was pre smartphone and the computers had just about all internet access blocked.
With my NYT crossword a day calendar, I’ve been using them as bookmarks. I’ve got about 8 physical books going right now so that works out well. In a crossword book, there’s no shame in going on to the next one if I’m stuck on the previous one, it’s not like it’s skipping ahead in a murder mystery.
I’ve been trying not to use google. My crossword time is my digital free time. But I guess I could look up one annoying answer when I’m done with my phone free time. Often, it’s a simple as a spelling. I’ll know the word, but not exactly how it’s spelled. The same goes for a proper name. Is it Tory or Tori? Marie or Maria?
A crossword puzzle dictionary sounds interesting and that would keep me digital free. I’ll start looking at those.
I do all the Times ones, using help maybe once a month on one Saturday clue.
The main thing is to understand the wordplay. Back in Margaret Farrar’s day, answers would be the variant of a variant of a Sumatran toadstool, and so dictionaries were big helps. Almost every word in Shortz era puzzles are easy - the clues are hard. Clues like the one Thudlow Boink gave are pretty common - once you get it once you’ll see it again.
Constructors often make the upper left corner, where most people start, the hardest corner, so if that gives you trouble start with the last few clues. You might get them and work your way up.
As mentioned Thursday puzzles (and sometimes Wednesday and Sunday puzzles) have tricks, such as you having to enter a Greek letter (like pi) for the sequence of letters. If you think you have the word and it just doesn’t fit, let it go and do some of the crossing clues, and you might get the trick. In the Sunday one the puzzle name sometimes helps, but daily ones don’t get names.
And remember, constructors like words with lots of vowels, which is why “oreo” and “Agee” are so popular. If you can think of several answers to a clue, the one with crossword friendly spelling is usually the right one.
And Eugene T. Maleska seemed to think it was his job to educate crossword solvers in opera.
Persistence and practice is what it takes. It can’t be done quickly; I’ve been solving NY Times Sunday crosswords for forty years, and it’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that I’ve been able to complete them without any help.
We have had crossword puzzle-related threads in the past, where we discuss clues and answers. One got hijacked (in a good way) by a poster (twickster) who was a crossword puzzle editor. She challenged us to come up with clues for typical words. You can find one such thread here:
Shortly after that, she started a separate clue-writing how-to and challenge. Find it here:
But the editors usually don’t write the puzzles do they? Are they selecting heavily for puzzles that match their own personal interests? Or are puzzle creators making puzzles that match the editor’s interests in hope of getting selected? Or maybe a synergy of those two?
I’ve noticed some serious errors in the Sunday NYT puzzles during the Will Shortz years, things like obviously misspelled words or clearly incorrect clue/answer combinations (like Hamlet’s Mother = Ophelia). Not often, true, but more than I’ve ever seen before. I’m doing old puzzles so there’s no point in complaining to Shortz, but he is a little smug so I have thought about collecting them as I find them and then sending them to him. I’m probably not the only one who would do that.
I’d think a major bookstore like a Barnes and Noble would be an exception. The puzzle books in the magazine racks at Walgreens or airport gift stores tend to be full of the very easy ones. If I’m in a pinch like that, I’ll grab a word search magazine in lieu of a ridiculously easy crossword magazine.
