That’s one of two main crossword blog/review sites. This is the other: Diary of a Crossword Fiend.
The two websites mentioned are really helpful for learners like me. There is also one for the LA Times crossword specifically called LA Times Crossword Corner.
By the way, this week’s free Thursday NY Times puzzle from the Archive is horrible from a newbie’s point of view IMHO. It’s from November 18, 2010, and it is constructed around a gimmick. The feat of construction is impressive, but to achieve that gimmick, there is a huge reliance on obscure proper nouns, arcane terms, etc. You know it’s bad when a puzzle has to resort to using slang that’s only used in Britain, but this puzzle uses British-only terms twice! For crossword experts, it was probably fun to see the gimmick, but for someone like me, it was a series of frustrating, unguessable terms and names I had never heard of. It is what I imagine it must have been like when Eugene Maleska was the puzzle editor. Maleska, who passed away in 1993, was a former English teacher who prided himself on arcane words, often from the past. Fortunately, Will Shortz, the current editor, has more of a games background and is much more about making the puzzle fun.
One thing that has helped me is to print the entire alphabet above the puzzle. I sometimes print the vowels underneath my alphabet too. It helps with “plugging in” letters and seeing what fits
Sometimes with down entries I’m stuck on, I’ll write out the letters I have with question marks for the blanks. Sometimes seeing it written left to right makes it easier to recognize what they’re going for.
I do the Guardian daily cryptics online, so I’ve picked up on a lot of the British terms. I’m stumped by the first clue, but the second one suggests FANCY THAT,
Ah. I get the second part (I saw the My Fair Lady revival not long ago) but the first part is not in my working vocabulary. I find that I solve lots of clues without really understanding them.
It’s not just American. My office mate in grad school was from New Zealand, and while he was very good at cryptics he said that he had trouble with British ones.
You can tell clever clues, as opposed to straightforward ones, since they often end in a “?”. That goes for Monday/Tuesday ones also.
Off to do this week’s New Yorker puzzle, on line.
Oh, sure, the question mark flags it as a sideways-thinking clue, but something like “Apple variety” wouldn’t generally be clued with a question mark at the end, in my experience. But, yeah, if you see that question mark, that definitely means you’re looking for something beyond the literal.
Correct on the second one, the first one is
PISS TAKER
NYTimes Thursday puzzles are almost all gimmick puzzles. It’s actually my favorite puzzle day! Now I must go do that November 18 2010 puzzle and see if I agree with you.
There’s an old joke, where the punchline fits your question. A tourist is walking through New York and asks a local “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”, and the man answers “Practice, practice, practice.”
My mother was a crossword fanatic. She could have used a pen, but still used a pencil. Growing up, I thought my vocabulary was small, until I got out in the real world and realized I was just comparing myself to her.
Bottom line - the more you solve, the larger your vocabulary gets and the more you begin to understand the nuances of the clues. If it ends with a question mark, it’s a pun. NYT has a different flow than the Dell books, and it takes a little bit to get into the flow.
One of the crosswords they had in every issue they called “Worlds Most Ornery Crossword”, where they gave two sets of clues - easy and hard. You folded the page over to obscure the easy clues if you wanted to solve using the hard clues. I actually liked that because if you were stumped, you could get a hint from the easy clues.
Finished! Took me right under 36 minutes, and I did look up a couple of them. I’m horrible at sports clues, for example.
That was a fun one, I liked the gimmick. That said, they’re definitely tougher, and they drove me nuts for a long time.
One of the more famous crossword puzzles to appear in the New York Times was the one for November 5, 1996, which was the day of the presidential election between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. Right in the middle of the puzzle there was a seven-letter space in 39 across, followed by ELECTED in 43 across. The gimmick was that you could solve the puzzle with either CLINTON or BOB DOLE in 39 across, and the down clues worked either way. (39 down, for example, was “black Halloween animal” and either BAT or CAT worked.)
Sometimes, you have to consider whether a clue has a double meaning. They make it look like there’s an obvious answer, but you’re unable to build from it.
Example: Lighted sign, 4 letters
I immediately thought NEON, but couldn’t build anything from those letters. In this case, it wasn’t what the sign was made of, but a prime example of such a sign. The answer turned out to be
EXIT
There are other occasions where a clue might have a ? after it, meaning there’s some kind of wordplay.
Example: Bashful roommate? (3 letters)
DOC
Double meaning again, this time taking advantage of the rule that the first letter of the clue will be capitalized. In this case, it was already a proper noun.
I use thesaurus.com frequently, but sometimes it’s not really a synonym. It’s more like poetic license.
Example: Formal will (5 letters)
SHALL
The way the clue was presented made me think of a lawyer reading a will in front of the deceased’s relatives and everybody’s dressed to the nines. I was looking at synonyms for “will” but to no avail. In this case, it turned out to be a shortened version of Formal version of the word “will”. Bastards.
A couple of weeks ago they included a special emergency puzzle section with the Sunday paper (print only, possibly) and the giant regular crossword had this feature. There are also three mini-crosswords and a medium sized one in the Sunday At Home section which replaced Travel. And a mini-puzzle every day on page 3 which I do in my head, no writing required.
Just came across this. I have two London’s Times cryptic books from the early 90s, and I think I’ve actually completed six or seven puzzles. Sure, most of them are partially filled in, but finishing one is actually an event for celebration.
The nice thing is they were gifts from one of my best friend’s dad, who has since passed away. On those rare occasions I finish one, I let her know and we have a nice little happy cry.
Practice, Practice, Practice.
I have the NYT app, so I do that puzzle every day. The good/bad thing about the app is that it keeps you honest. There are times where I’ve filled in the whole puzzle, but it pops up “keep trying” rather than playing the happy solving song, so I’m forced to go back into the puzzle to find the right answers. When I would finish filling out all the boxes on paper, I just assumed that I got them all right.
Most weeks, I’ll get Monday-Wednesday without any issues. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are crapshoots for me. I’m about 50/50 for the puzzles at the end of the week with little to no help, but sometimes even a Tuesday will have an intersection of two things I do not know and cannot guess (golfers? why do NYT crosswords love golfers so much?) There’s usually two or three a month that I end up having to brute force the answer.
My personal rules are that I have to go through the entire thing at least twice each direction in a row (across/down/across/down) without making any entries before I google or alexa an answer. If I get at least one entry, i start over so that I completely make sure there’s no way I can build on anything before looking something up.
Over time, I’ve gotten much better at them. I also know what an etui is.
The question mark is mandatory for punny answers. In the case of “Apple variety,” it is not a pun. The iMac is literally an Apple variety. They exploit the fact that all clues are written starting with a capital letter. There are many clues like this that start with a proper noun, but you don’t realize it’s a proper noun because it’s also a common noun.
I would say that the larger your *crossword *vocabulary gets. Crosswords have a collection of words that show up all the time that do not show up in daily speech. When is the last time you heard a confused person earnestly say they were “at sea”? You would think that Yoko Ono is the only artist in the world. How many people do you know who actually own an awl, or an adze?
Lots of great advice.
The only thing I’d add after many years of doing crosswords, is there’s no need to feel like you should (or must) be able to do every crossword from every source.
There are some sources I enjoy and some I dislike and stopped doing. Personally, I really enjoy ones where I can reason out the answer from the clue like “Apple variety” cited above.
I have no time for the ones that have a lot of questions like “Sumerian King” “Former Secretary of State” or other really obscure “crossword-only” trivia questions like that. I try a puzzle once or twice and if they have a lot of those questions, I just drop that brand from my list.
For those interested in the NYT Crossword, Stuff You Should Know podcast recently did a short episode on its history, how they do them etc.
You all might be interested in a documentary about Shortz called Wordplay which came out in 2006.