XWord Info: New York Times Crossword Answers and Insights

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
• Messages hidden in clues

Variety puzzles

• Acrostics Solve online!
• Cryptic, Diagramless, PandA, etc.
• PDF-only Variety puzzles
• Variety puzzle FAQ

Personal collections

• Grid Art — puzzles that caught my eye
• Puzzles with interesting visual elements

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
• Puzzles with both specified words
• Most frequently used clues

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
• Shortz Number and puzzle totals
• Highest lifetime Scrabble average
• Constructors with the most collaborators
• 583 Shortz Era constructor photos
• Debut words by constructor
• Constructor debuts by year
• Variety puzzle constructors
• Youngest constructors
• Stats about women constructors
• Puzzles by the JASA Crossword Class
• Alternate constructor names

About the Database

There are 9,959 Shortz Era crosswords from Sunday, November 21, 1993 to Thursday, February 25, 2021

Those puzzles come from 1,024 constructors. They include 116,772 unique answer words.

We now have an additional 16,083 older puzzles going back to Sunday, February 15, 1942.

Across Lite & PDF links

• Recent puzzles in Across Lite and PDF
• Across Lite files organized by constructor
• Across Lite files from a calendar

Contact us

Jeff Chen

XWord Info was created by Jim Horne.

It is now operated by Jeff Chen who provides commentary on each daily puzzle.

Stay up to date: subscribe to our mailing list. We promise no spam.

Jim sometimes still writes about crosswords at his personal blog: The Further Adventures of Jim Horne

Crossword blogs

Collaborate & Compete

• To begin, read the FAQ
• Collaborate with a friend
• Compete against a friend

Info for programmers

• Join our Open Source project on GitHub. AcrossLiteToText is a useful utility that demonstrates .puz parsing.
• XPF Universal Data Format (XML) defined
• Puzzles in JSON format with sample code

Other puzzle links

• The Crossword Puzzle Moment
• Garson Hampfield, Crossword Inker
• XWord Info Bar Game
• The Rachel Maddow crossword (our most viewed puzzle)
• Options for pop-up tooltips

Newsreader feed

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Tips

• Click on any date to see that day's full puzzle including answers.
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• Questions? See the XWord Info FAQ list.
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