How to get better at crosswords?

[Gary_T]

The New York Times website has a puzzle section ( The Crossword - The New York Times) that can be played online. Each week it offers three free archival crosswords, one from either Monday or Tuesday, one from Wednesday or Thursday, and one from Friday or Saturday. It also has this article: How To Solve The New York Times Crossword - Crossword Guides - The New York Times .

The online puzzles have neat features like being able to check to see if you’ve entered a wrong letter or word, or showing the correct letter or word. It also has a feature that aggravates the Dickens out of me by automatically scrolling the clue list to where it thinks you want it, which is almost never where I actually want it. But as my sister would say, what do you want for nothing, your money back?

Anyway, the how-to-solve article offers helpful insight into how the puzzles “think,” so to speak. It may help you improve.

[Athena]

@Chefguy

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.

Pretty much this, with the addition of “look it up if you need to.” Looking it up is a very good way to get better at crosswords. Themes and answers repeat over time, and you’ll eventually remember that an ‘eft’ is a baby salamander or whatever.

It took me years, but I eventually got to the point that I can do the NY Time daily crossword pretty easily. My average on Saturday is ~34 minutes. Heh, according to the stats, it took me 1150 puzzles to get there, and that’s not counting the ones before they started tracking stats.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Spoons

And Eugene T. Maleska seemed to think it was his job to educate crossword solvers in opera.

@Roderick_Femm

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’m sure that’s part of it. Plus, the editors do sometimes write many of the clues. In the Atlantic article “How Will Shortz Edits a New York Times Crossword Puzzle” Will Shortz claims “On average, about half the clues are mine.”

This article from the Chicago Reader cites an example of the difference cluing can make:

Maleska was a bane. His tenure was characterized by an overreliance on what cruciverbalists call “crosswordese,” needlessly abstruse clues and answers that hinder solution of the puzzle more than they help. In Cruciverbalism, Stanley Newman supplies an example. Maleska would’ve looked favorably, he thinks, on “Fibre of the gomuti palm,” the trickiest clue in Arthur Wynne’s inaugural word cross. In the post-Maleska era the clue might have been different: “Homer Simpson exclamation.” For both clues the answer is DOH.

Of course, Maleska wouldn’t have been able to reference Homer Simpson during most of his tenure. Older crosswords just didn’t have access to all the cultural references that have come along since their time (a point that is touched upon in one of the threads Spoons linked to).

[staili]

I started doing crossword puzzles in earnest a little over a year ago. I do the LA Times and the NY Times mini one every day, the Washington Post Sunday crossword each week (they have the LA Times one the rest of the week), and the three free NY Times puzzles each week.

The end-of-the-week LA Times ones are significantly easier than the NY Times ones. The LA Times ones rarely get to the Friday/Saturday NYT level. For me at least, Saturday NYT is way harder than Friday. It probably takes me one-and-a-half times as long to do Saturday over Friday.

I have noticed a huge improvement in my solving ability over time, but it took about six months before I really made a breakthrough. The first time I completed a Wednesday NYT puzzle without any help was in September. Now I can often do the end-of-the-week ones, although it may involve way too many minutes and/or putting it aside for a while.

There have been a lot of great tips already. Doing a lot of puzzles gives you a lot of “crossword-ese,” both obscure words as mentioned earlier (ENSE is a word in the Massachusetts state motto that has come up at least 3 times in the past year or so, and I’ve learned a lot about European rivers like ODER), as well as answers with a useful letter distribution that will come up over and over again (a 4-letter word for a male tennis player is almost certainly going to be ASHE; 5 letters is NADAL. I put those answers in now, even if I don’t know the actual facts involved in the clue.).

One trick that helped me enormously: I do the puzzles online, and when I feel like I’m truly stuck, I turn on the “autocheck,” which tells me which letters are wrong but doesn’t tell me what the right letters are. And then I try again until I figure it out. That’s really helped my learning, as opposed to more passively having the right answer revealed.

With the NYT specifically, a large amount of the end-of-the-week cluing is wordplay, and you have to get into that frame of mind. This is where practice really helps. There are a lot of kinds of wordplay, but it’s a finite number of types, and if you do a lot of them, you learn the types. The same types of tricks get used again. For example, “Nice summer” at the end of the week means “summer in the city of Nice in France,” or the word “summer” in French, ie, ETE. Completely fooled me the first time, but it’s come up again, and now I know.

Within the past month or so, I’ve started doing the NYT Spelling Bee game, and I’m much better at it than I used to be. I think that staring at half-filled words has helped me with that.

[Novelty_Bobble]

The crosswords I tend to do are the cryptic style. I’m not great but getting better. The trick is in breaking down and decoding the form of the question.

e.g. “result of getting excited before sex, blistering” 6 letters.

There is a word in there that describes the word you are looking for, usually at the beginning or the end of the sentence.
In this case we are looking for a 6 letter word that means “result”. So now what? well, experience will tell you that “S” is an abbreviation for “sex” and one gets “up” when you get excited. So the clue tells you to put that before the “S”. So we have “UPS_ _ _” and another word for “blistering” is “hot”.

The answer is “UPSHOT”

Not easy, and there is a definite skill to be learned regarding the conventions used for the various question forms and abbreviations and the terms used that guide you in the decoding. The best thing is to do what you can, don’t get too frustrated and make sure you get the answers and work backwards to heard you learn the cues and decoding guidance.

[Dallas_Jones]

A couple of tips:

1. Print clearly! The human brain is very good at recognizing patterns. You may be able to read your own chicken scratch but your brain will fill in the pattern easier if you print clearly, like the phrases on Wheel of Fortune.

2. If you have two or more possible solutions to a clue, the one with the most vowels is usually the correct answer. Building a crossword puzzle is much easier when words with many vowels are used.

3. Read My Crossword Life by Melissa Balmain. A funny short story that uses many of the obscure words that crossword puzzle makers use. You will see these words time and time again.

"My Crossword Life," by Melissa Balmain

[CookingWithGas]

You get better over time with practice, just like anything else. You start to notice certain words that are very commonly used, and constructors can be very clever about coming up with novel clues for the same old word. You also get a feel for the crossword culture, how to solve the puns, various types of theme answers, and so on.

I attempt every NYT puzzle. I do it on their app, so I do have the advantage of knowing whether my completed puzzle is correct. I get 90% of Sun, 100% of Mon-Wed, 75% of Thursday, 50% of Friday, and maybe 10% of Saturday. I have been getting better over the last few years I’ve been doing them. I used to look up obscure clues but now I do not look anything up because I can usually get enough cross-answers to get a word even if I don’t know what it is. For example, if a clue is an “actress” that I don’t know, at least I know it’s a woman’s name so I can suss it out if I have a couple of letters.

I also do the LA Times, which are a lot easier than the NYT.

[Voyager]

@Novelty_Bobble

The crosswords I tend to do are the cryptic style. I’m not great but getting better. The trick is in breaking down and decoding the form of the question.

Not easy, and there is a definite skill to be learned regarding the conventions used for the various question forms and abbreviations and the terms used that guide you in the decoding. The best thing is to do what you can, don’t get too frustrated and make sure you get the answers and work backwards to heard you learn the cues and decoding guidance.

The trouble with British cryptics for Americans is that there are lot of location dependent clues, and clues or answers involving rugby or cricket. It also helps to have a classical education, the advantage Inspector Morse has. I’m doing London Daily Times puzzle book 2 which I bought in 1980. It is tough.
Chambers has a crossword puzzle book with many fewer culture specific items. Chambers publishes the standard dictionary used for cryptics.
The NY Times publishes a cryptic every few months, and a while ago there was a flurry of American cryptic books, but they died off. I guessed that people picked them up and then had no “clue” about how to do them, so sales of Vol. 2 plummeted. twickster who was in a position to know confirmed this.

[Voyager]

@Thudlow_Boink

I’m sure that’s part of it. Plus, the editors do sometimes write many of the clues. In the Atlantic article “How Will Shortz Edits a New York Times Crossword Puzzle” Will Shortz claims “On average, about half the clues are mine.”

This article from the Chicago Reader cites an example of the difference cluing can make:Of course, Maleska wouldn’t have been able to reference Homer Simpson during most of his tenure. Older crosswords just didn’t have access to all the cultural references that have come along since their time (a point that is touched upon in one of the threads Spoons linked to).

Stanley Newman seems to have loathed Maleska. I sent him a letter pointing out an error (softwear instead of software) and he was quite snarky replying.

[Voyager]

@dalej42

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.

Maybe I should also learn sudoku.

I haven’t seen a Games World of Puzzles magazine in an airport store in ages. If you must buy a puzzle book there, I’d suggest getting a book of variety word puzzles. Far more interesting than word search and more variety than just a crossword book.

[nightshadea]

they quit publishing games about 3 years ago …I had a sub received a small note about it and made the subscription service cash out the rest of the sub …

[Roderick_Femm]

@Gary_T

I’ve found a nice selection of NYT puzzle books at my local Barnes and Noble store.

Sadly, not mine. It’s a large store, 2 floors, and a large magazine section, but there are about 9 million sudoku books and a few easy crosswords.

I used to work with a Brit who was quite good at the cryptic puzzles, apparently she’d been doing them for yonks (i.e. a long time), and she tried to help me but I could never get anything much except frustrated.

There’s another type of puzzle I used to like but I’ve sort of gone off of, Acrostics. If you’re not familiar with them, there are two parts of the puzzle. One part is a quotation, which at the start is just blank spaces; the other part is all the letters from the quotation mixed up and made into other words, also blank spaces at the start, and for each of those words there’s a clue. Also the first letter of those other words, reading down, is the quoted person’s name, and the topic. So you start with the clues, trying to find the words, and then you transfer those letters into the quote, and try to find words or strings that people might use in a quote, and any new words you find in the quote you transfer back to the clued words, and so on, back and forth. The problem with these puzzles for me is that the last 30% or more of the puzzle is just labor, transferring letters back and forth, because by then you’ve got most of the quote and most of the words. But don’t let me put you off them, if you haven’t tried them. The only place I know to find them is in books ordered online. Now that I think about it, these would be a good type of puzzle to do online, if the software would automatically transfer the letters back and forth for you.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Roderick_Femm

Sadly, not mine. It’s a large store, 2 floors, and a large magazine section, but there are about 9 million sudoku books and a few easy crosswords.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a Barnes & Noble, but years ago, at least, they had a puzzle book section (with things like collections of New York Times puzzles) that was entirely separate from (in a different part of the store from) the magazine section.

[pulykamell]

@Thudlow_Boink

Here’s a pretty typical entry from a crossword I just did: “Apple variety.”

Hah. Got that one right away.

Yes, you do get better. With the NYTimes puzzle, you do have to think a bit laterally sometimes, or assume wordplay is going on. NYTimes tends to be pretty good at avoiding the crosswordese, but you gotta know weird shit like golfer Isao Aoki, as his names tends to turn up a lot when constructors write themselves into a corner and need a bunch of vowels. So, yeah, after time you learn obscure stuff.

The Thursday puzzle is my favorite; but it very often involves rebuses (which in the crossword world is multiple letters in a single box), numbers, symbols, or weird tricks like the theme clues snaking up and down and stuff like that. Basically, anything goes. When you get into a Thursday puzzle, the fun – for me – is figuring out what the gimmick is. There’s not a gimmick 100% of the time, but it’s the puzzle that will usually have a gimmick for that week.

Fridays and Saturdays. Yeah, those took me like many many puzzles to get the hang of. Once again, it’s typically not very obscure crosswordese in the Will Shortz era. It may require a good bit of pop culture knowledge, but it’s typically pretty straightforward English phrases with sneaky clues, and the trick is in deciphering those clues. I’m looking at my stats, and I’m not a speed solver, but a typical Friday or Saturday takes me 20 minutes, and my best times on both are 12 minutes.

Just keep doing it, and learn the “language” of the puzzle. Always assume misdirection, although sometimes assuming misdirection is the misdirection itself. haha.

[Spoons]

@Voyager

I haven’t seen a Games World of Puzzles magazine in an airport store in ages. If you must buy a puzzle book there, I’d suggest getting a book of variety word puzzles. Far more interesting than word search and more variety than just a crossword book.

I second this suggestion. I do love my collections of NYT Sunday puzzles, but every now and then, I just want to do something that doesn’t require a lot of knowledge, or will exercise my brain in other ways. In a collection of variety puzzles, you’ll get crostics (which do require knowedge), frameworks (a word game requiring more logic than anything else), logic puzzles that obviously require logic, silly time-killers like “Find the differences in these pictures,” and plenty of others. Kind of nice to have the choice, if you want to do a puzzle of some sort, but don’t necessarily want to get into a crossword.

@Thudlow_Boink

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a Barnes & Noble, but years ago, at least, they had a puzzle book section (with things like collections of New York Times puzzles) that was entirely separate from (in a different part of the store from) the magazine section.

That’s where they would be. The magazine racks at my local big-box bookstore are where you find the monthly PennyPress variety and crossword puzzle magazines; but things like the NYT crossword collections are in the Games and Puzzles section of the bookstore itself, alongside Biography, History, Sports, and so on.

[pulykamell]

@pulykamell

Always assume misdirection, although sometimes assuming misdirection is the misdirection itself. haha.

Actually, I should amend this. The misdirection tends to happen more in the later-in-the-week puzzles. Mondays and Tuesdays are usually fairly straightforward. There might be a little wordplay here and there, but they keep it chill early in the week. Wednesdays the misdirection starts ramping up. The “Apple variety” clue sounds like something I might find on a Wednesday or later puzzle (though it would not be weird to get it on a Tuesday, as it’s not THAT crazy of a clue). It’s more like the later-in-the-week puzzles will have more of these types of clues, I guess.

[Novelty_Bobble]

@Voyager

The trouble with British cryptics for Americans is that there are lot of location dependent clues, and clues or answers involving rugby or cricket. It also helps to have a classical education, the advantage Inspector Morse has.

That is a problem for any cross-cultural puzzle I guess.

Mind you, I’ve just scanned the crossword in my recent copy of “private eye” and there is very little in the answers or the clues that would baffle an American.

The only two that might not translate well are

“Who mocks the urethra?” (4-5)

and

“Just imagine putting Tory leader in Ascot wear” (5-4)

[Mean_Mr.Mustard]

This website examines the NY Times crosswords and others to an incredible degree.

Very entertaining and informative to go there after completing - or almost completing - a specific puzzle to read about it.
mmm

[Jack_Batty]

There’s another surefire way of getting better at crossword puzzles: cheat. Seriously. I didn’t know anything about blackbirds, literary collections or former names for Tokyo before I got stuck in a crossword puzzle however many years ago. But I know all about anis, anas and Edo now, by golly.

[RitterSport]

@nightshadea

they quit publishing games about 3 years ago …I had a sub received a small note about it and made the subscription service cash out the rest of the sub …

Games World of Puzzles is still published, and my wife would pick it up regularly at the airport (she was there all the time for her job, until the recent lockdown). Now we subscribe to it. It has great crosswords at all levels, plus all kinds of other fun puzzles that can help with crossword skills.

OP, if you can do them online on in an app, do that. I was never able to do Friday or Saturday puzzles, but the freedom to put in guesses and then remove them cleanly really, really helps. Now, I have a 200+ day streak.

Also, while I don’t Google answers, I allow myself to phone different friends for different types of clues. So, pop culture questions will often go to my kids, classic movie references goes to this one friend who loves that stuff, sports go to another friend, etc. By the time they get back to me, I often have it figured out, but sometimes it’s crucial. I don’t allow myself to ask my crossword-solving friends, because that’s just like Googling the answer.

So, solving them electronically is a life saver. And, reach out to friends with specific knowledge when stuck.