New York Times Crossword Answers, Stats, Observations

Crosswords

• Solutions from a calendar
• Enter a date:
• Sunday puzzles listed by date with titles
• Puzzles with circles or shaded squares
• Rebus puzzles (symbols or multiple letters in a single square)
• Grids with the fewest blocks and most blocks
• Grids with the fewest words and most words
• Puzzles with the longest avg. word length
• Unusual symmetry and asymmetry
• Pangrams and puzzles with the fewest letters used
• Scrabble scores: highest daily, lowest daily, highest Sunday, lowest Sunday
• Schrödinger puzzles aka quantum crosswords
• Most wide open grids
• Record stacks and some notable 15s
• Grids with unchecked squares
• Grids with no short answers or with very short answers
• Grids with repeated answer words
• Uniclue puzzles
• Oddly shaped or sized grids
• Freshness Factor™ Hall of Fame
• Most common grid patterns
• Patrick Berry's 2011 special six-part "Cross" word contest puzzles and solutions
• Eugene T. Maleska's stepquotes
• The six 1999 Millennium puzzles.
• Will Shortz picks his favorite puzzles and his favorite constructors
• Puzzles with comments from Will Shortz
• Will Shortz provides a clue-by-clue analysis of how he edits a crossword
• Puzzles with Notepads or Jim's personal notes
• Jeff Chen's Puzzles of the Week: solve them or view grids with comments or constructors
• The Misenko duplicates
• Stats about NYT Puzzle Editors

Variety puzzles

• Acrostics Solve online!
• Cryptic, Diagramless, PandA, etc.
• Variety puzzle FAQ

Words and Letters

Shortz Era

• Most popular answer words
• Most popular words by length
• All Fifteen-letter words sorted alphabetically
• Even longer words sorted by length
• Debut words in the past month
• Debut words by year
• Most answers of each length
• Record setting letter counts

All Time

• Most popular words by length
• Missing words not found in any puzzles
• Random unique words

Constructors

• Enter a name:
• Most prolific authors (baseball cards)
• Constructors from the past month
• Celebrity Constructors
• Puzzle counts by day of week
• Puzzle counts by year
• Pangrams sorted by constructor
• Puzzles by the JASA Crossword Class
• Shortz Number and puzzle totals
• Highest lifetime Scrabble average
• 458 Shortz Era constructor photos
• Debut words by constructor
• Constructor debuts by year
• Variety puzzle constructors
• Youngest constructors
• Stats about women constructors

Older crosswords from The Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project

Data from puzzles before Will Shortz became editor are kept separate from modern puzzle stats. XWord Info has all 16,083 pre-Shortz crosswords from 2/15/1942 to 11/20/1993.

Selected pre-Shortz observations

Recent pre-Shortzian blog posts