III. "Rules" of the Puzzle You can read all of what I think the NYT rules are, or you can skip to the bottom and read the actual NYT Rules. (If you're here to hear how to play well as well, you should go here too.) Below are some of the rules I think New York Times crossword authors follow. I'm sure there are more rules (for example, the most imprudent word I've ever seen is ass, which is always a mule or an oaf, so I figure there's a rule about George Carlin's seven words), but I still don't know what they are. Some of the rules that you won't find below or on the next page are no doubt found in the regular New York Times Stylebook, and the rest, such as matters of taste and propriety, are no doubt whatever the editor says they are. In any case, even though not all of these "rules" appear in the Will Shortz document or the NYT Stylebook, they are still helpful and, as far as I know, accurate. There are others, more subtle ones you as a player would probably never notice, and I'll alert you to them as well. A. Rules for the grid There's a surprising number of rules for the layout of the blank rectangular grid itself. Most of them serve merely to make the author's job more difficult, which should give you a better appreciation of how difficult that job is. 1. The grid is diagonally symmetrical. Said another way, if you rotate it 180 degrees it's the same, light for light and dark for dark. However, my uncle Tom, literally lying on his death bed, once found a New York Times crossword grid that was not perfectly symmetrical in this way; in the lower right of the grid a light and its dark neighbor had been switched relative to the configuration in the upper left corner. There are examples of other exceptions here and here. 2. The grid is always an odd number of cells on a side, which means there's always a center row and a center column and therefore a single center cell. The Monday through Saturday puzzles are 15 by 15 for a total of 225 cells. The Sunday puzzle is 21 by 21 for 441 cells or sometimes 23 by 23 for 529 cells, which makes it 96% bigger or 135% bigger respectively. Small puzzles are faster to play, of course, other things being equal, but large puzzles can be more fun because they allow for a greater variety of long answers, which literally gives the authors more room to express their creativity. 3. Every answer must be longer than two characters. On another page of this essay are two examples of maxing this out. 4. The grid may not contain "islands" of light cells, i.e., the grid must not be divided into two (or more) separate chunks. Said yet another way, you should be able to connect any light cell to any other light cell, using only horizontal and vertical line segments, without having to cross a dark cell. A grid with an island (and if there's one then there must be at least two) is much easier to construct than a proper one, but then what you have is essentially two entirely separate crossword puzzles that have been packed into one large square. 5. Every character must appear in both an Across answer and a Down answer, or, said another way, there may be no "uncrossed letters." It is the violation of this rule and the one above that makes crosswords puzzles much easier to write. Generally, the higher is the ratio of lights to darks, the harder is the puzzle to play. Also, the larger is any particular area of the grid that is uninterrupted by a dark, the harder is the puzzle to write. For example, it is difficult to write a puzzle in which two long answers appear one on top of the other, and it is much more difficult still to write one in which three long answers do so. So, when you look at a new grid and see such a configuration, you may be fairly certain that that area of the puzzle will contain some obscure or unlikely answers in the down direction. Either that or you may be fairly certain the constructor and the editor tried really hard (and keep in mind that the later in the week is the NYT puzzle, the harder it's supposed to be). For example, in the January 31, 1997, puzzle there appeared not one but two such contiguous 15-character triplets (a really difficult achievement), one at the top and one at the bottom of the grid. Here are a few of the answers in the Down direction: EST, ATHOS, TARTED, OGEEARCH, NEE, EDOM, ERI, UND, TYS, CHIGOE, DAH, ODETTA, DEVOIR, and EBON.
B. Rules for clues and answers There are scads of rules for the clues and answers, and I'm sure I'll forget some in trying to list them below. As you play more you will discover them on your own. In any case, knowing these rules can certainly help you to finish a puzzle at all and to finish it faster. 1. If the clue is a person's last name, the answer will be a person's last name. For example, if the clue is "Actor related to Kennedy" then the answer will be LAWFORD, not PETER. The same rule applies to first names. For example, if the clue is "Jacqueline's husband," the answer will be JOHN, not KENNEDY. (Furthermore, if the clue is "Jackie's husband," the answer will be JACK, because in both cases the nickname is used, whereas in the first example the formal names are used.) 2. If an answer is abbreviated or shortened, the clue will almost always indicate as much. Sometimes the clue ends in the straightforward designation "Abbr.," as in "Worldwide: Abbr.," for which an answer is INTL, for international. Sometimes a word in the clue is abbreviated; for example, if the clue is "Delivery co." the answer will be FEDEX, not FEDERALEXPRESS. And sometimes the clue will contain some obvious or less than obvious reference to the shortening of the answer. If the clue is "Shakespeare, to his friends," the answer will be WILL or even WILLIE or BILL or BILLIE or BILLY, but not WILLIAM. If the clue is "U. of Kansas mascot," the answer will be HAWK rather than the full name, JAYHAWK. Above I said the clue will almost always indicate that the answer is shortened. The few exceptions appear to fit these criteria:
Examples are TNT, CBS and LSD. 3. Except in certain theme answers, no puzzle will contain the same answer more than once (although individual inconsequential words might appear more than once, such as in the June 22, 2001, NYT puzzle, in which 41-Across ("Disregard") and 27-Down ("Hoodwink, in a way") look like this:
L An exception to this rule also appeared in the October 7, 1998, puzzle, but it was worth it. 46-Across is SHOWBIZ and 51-Across is QUIZSHOW. The theme was the letter "Z," and the other answers were WHIZBANG, ZIMMER, GEE WHIZ, MARTINEZ, ZEN, ZIT, OZONE, THE WIZARD OF OZ (a double), ZZ TOP (another double, a trio that a friend and I once drove 200 miles to see and whence we then drove 200 miles back the same night, on a whim), and PIZAZZ (a rare triple). A more blatant oops of this sort occurred in a 1997 NYT crossword. 4. No significant word in the answer will appear in the clue. If the clue is "Popular doll," you may be sure the answer is not BARBIE DOLL. Furthermore, if the clue is "Oil exporting grp.," you may be sure the answer is not OPEC, because the term "exporting" would appear, one way or another, in both the clue and the answer. 5. Some clues are of the fill-in-the-blank type, e.g., "Cat on a Hot Tin ___." The length of the dash is meaningless, and it can represent more than one word. Will Shortz's old friend Merl Reagle tells me in an e-mail that Will restricts FITBs to no more than five letters unless the puzzle is "particularly dazzling." 6. Sometimes a clue will be a pair of terms that both appear in conjunction with the answer in unrelated phrases. For example, if the clue is "Quayle or Webster," the answer will likely be DAN (although it could be SENATOR). With regard to that example above, note that if the clue had been "Quayle and Webster," the answer would have been DANS. The "and" in such clues always requires a plural answer, and the "or" in such clues always requires a singular answer. Similarly, if the clue is "Sonny and kin," the answer will be BONOS, plural. And if the clue is "Sonny's erstwhile wife's namesakes," the answer will be CHERS, plural. 7. Certain terms in clues are rendered in certain specific, idiosyncratic forms.
Apparently there's quite a large latitude on these, so don't take them too seriously. 8. If the answer is in a foreign language, the clue will indicate as much one way or another. For example, the answer to "Capital of Italia" is ROMA (not ROME), because both place names are rendered in Italian. However, I must point out a cute clue that appeared in the February 5, 1997, NYT puzzle, by Jonathan Schmaltzbach, in which the answer for the clue "Italy's capital" is LIRA. For another example, consider this clue: "Number of mousquetaires." When I saw this I realized I needed to remember or guess at how many Mouseketeers there were and translate that number into French. From my dim recollection of the "The Walt Disney Show" I guessed there were from maybe eight to 30 Mouseketeers, so I decided I'd try to fit in all the French numbers from eight to 30 that were spelled with five characters. Well, after way too much effort, I finally discovered the answer that there were only three, or trois, Mouseketeers . . . and that they were, of course, Musketeers, courtesy of Alexandre Dumas. And I even had a French-English dictionary right in front of me at the time.
Who cares what you think the rules are? Show me the real rules from Will Shortz. |
A. Rules for the grid
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