XWord Info Frequently Asked Questions

This site celebrates NYT crosswords and the people who make them. It provides a comprehensive list of every daily puzzle (and most Variety puzzles) going back to the very first NYT crossword published on Sunday, February 15, 1942. Puzzles with special attributes are noted. Records in various categories are tracked. Modern Era data is organized by constructor — a feature unique to this site.

See the Grand Tour for a list of features.

XWord Info is an essential resource for constructors, and crossword enthusiasts will discover interesting insights. Casual solvers will find puzzle solutions and can learn about the rich history of their hobby.

Only some.

Daily puzzles in the Modern Era are not available to solve. We do provide links to both solve and print them. Those links go to nytimes.com, and you'll need an NYT Games Subscription to play or print.

Pre-Shortz daily puzzles can be solved here. We also have a limited number of Variety puzzles, including acrostics. Note that our solver requires a mouse and keyboard. Phones are not supported. You must be logged on to an XWord Info account to solve Variety puzzles.

The best approach is to poke around and explore. You can view lists of puzzles that meet various criteria, click on a puzzle to see it displayed in full with the answers, click on an answer to see what clues have been used for it, click on the displayed date to see the answer word in context, etc.

This site is expensive to run. Your payments help offset those costs.

If all you are looking for are answers to recent clues, the 45 most recent puzzles are always freely available. Older pre-Shortz puzzles are also always available.In fact, you can both see them and even solve these older crosswords online for free!

Many other pages require you to sign up for an XWord Info account.

Only to solve and print Modern Era daily puzzles. Those links go directly to nytimes.com.

Sign up for an NYT Games Subscription here.

I'm glad you asked! Pages requested via links on blogs or other sites are allowed to come through without registration.

When Jim Horne started blogging about crosswords, he wondered what he could learn about NYT puzzles through statistical analysis, so in 2007, he started XWord Info. In October 2008, he was hired by The New York Times to start the Wordplay column, writing there for three years.

We do our best to expand rebus entries (including ones that are interpreted differently in different directions) and even correctly parse answers that go around corners or do other such tricks, but there are likely still bugs. Please let us know if you spot any.

Puzzles from October 23, 1996 to now come from the New York Times through an agreement we have with them. Originally, we didn't think we could get older puzzles, but we learned that Barry Haldiman has been collecting crosswords in electronic form for a long time and he has graciously offered to share some of them. Thanks to Mr. Haldiman, we acquired NYT puzzles back to November 21, 1993, the start of the Will Shortz Era.

In 2012, David Steinberg started The Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project dedicated to digitizing earlier NYT crosswords. On August 26, 2015, the project declared victory. All known NYT crosswords are now available here on XWord Info. Pre-Shortz stats are kept separate from Modern Era data.

Constructor photos are courtesy of the puzzle authors themselves. We are grateful to them all. A few very old ones are artificially colorized.

• Row and Column count refers to the size of the grid
• Words is the number of clues or answers. Single answers that are phrases count as one word. NYT guidelines call for a maximum of 78 words for 15x15 puzzles, and 140 words for 21x21 grids. These are sometimes exceeded to handle special themes.
• Blocks is the number of black squares.
• Average word length is an obvious mathematical calculation. Puzzles with higher averages tend to be harder to construct.
• Missing letters are ones that are absent from the grid. Puzzles that use all 26 letters are said to be pangrams.
• Scrabble average is the total tile value of all the letters divided by the number of letters.
• Open squares is an XWord Info invention. Grids seem open if they have large areas of white space. This calculation counts the number of white squares that are not next to black squares, even diagonally.
• Cheater squares are black squares that can be removed without affecting the overall word count of the grid. Constructors often try to avoid these, but some are often inevitable and many great puzzles have plenty of cheaters. If you click the "Analyze" button, you'll see cheater squares marked with a + in the colorized grid.
• Debuts is the number of words that first appeared in this puzzle. They are colored differently in the answer section. Words that are reused (they debuted on this puzzle butwere picked up in other puzzles later) are also indicated.
• Spans counts the number of answer words that span the full grid. Double, triple, or quadruple stacks are also noted.
• Freshness Factor is an attempt to algorithmically determine how "fresh" a grid is based on how often we've seen its answer words used before.

If they are statistically significant in some way, perhaps there is a particularly low block count or high Scrabble average, they are highlighted in a yellow block. Click the highlighted link to see the relevant stats page and it should be clear why the stat is called out.

We want to demonstrate how useful and how popular our Finder Page is.

It's not page views. We count each click of the Search or Regex button. As of this moment, we've processed 29,557,585 searches. That seems like a lot.

Dates here match the publication dates in the New York Times. In syndication, the Sunday puzzle runs two weeks behind, and the dailies are five weeks behind. Go to the Calendar page and count back the appropriate number of weeks.

Yes.

XWord Info is an ASP.NET web application running on the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. Data is stored in SQL Server. Software development is done in Visual Studio with the help of ReSharper. Server-side code is written in C#. Client-side code is written in TypeScript. We use jQuery and a few of its associated libraries. Now you know.

Mostly from Princeton University. To make it available here, we're required to provide this notice:

WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

THIS SOFTWARE AND DATABASE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. BY WAY OF EXAMPLE, BUT NOT LIMITATION, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT-ABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE USE OF THE LICENSED SOFTWARE, DATABASE OR DOCUMENTATION WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY PATENTS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADEMARKS OR OTHER RIGHTS.

This useful word list includes many proper nouns, names, phrases, etc. Even after removing all items shorter than 3 letters, longer than 23 letters, and any containing digits like Y2K, there are still 142,829 entries.

We use a few other dictionaries as well, totaling 704,758 unique external words.

Funny you should ask, because we don't actually get the data from OneLook.

We do get it from the exact same data source that OneLook and RhymeZone and some other sites use: DataMuse. We're grateful that they provide this awesome resource.

Wordnik is a different external source for words and phrases only, not patterns. It provides audio pronunciations and a large number of definitions from many dictionaries — useful for writing clues.

A note on both OneLook and Wordnik — because they use external data outside of our control, they can return results that are inappropriate for crosswords. Caveat emptor.

Short answer: our site is secure, and we protect your data.

We take security seriously. Our pages are served using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL.) That’s the same encryption system your bank uses for web transactions. That lock icon next to the address bar in your browser guarantees that your information cannot be intercepted by third parties.

Passwords on our site are always encrypted. We cannot retrieve your password for you, but we can provide links that let you set a new password if you ever forget yours.

If the “remember me” option is checked when you log in to XWord Info, your encrypted login information is also stored in a cookie in your local browser. This common practice allows you to access our website without having to log on each time. We "remember" you by referencing that cookie.

Unless you’re signed in with an Angel account, you’ll see Google ads on many pages. Google uses cookies to try to learn things about you in an attempt to deliver the most relevant ads. Much of our site is free, and we rely on revenue from Google ads to help pay for the operation of our site.