New York Times, Thursday, December 24, 2015

For this puzzle, the seed was solving the straightforward entry SOCRATES in another puzzle and seeing it as SO/CRATES and wondering if other ancient Greek names had the same property. Then I came across HIPPO/CRATES and ARI/STOP/HANES. It took me a while to find DEMOS/THE/NES, and the two bonus entries were SAP/PHO and PIN/DAR, if solvers view them that way. GREEK and PLAYS also fit in nicely to include a tie-in to the theme.

This led to the NW and SE corners being wide open, with a lot of grunt work and different submitted versions going into finding the right fill for those areas. The only NW option I saw included MOPTOPS / MOSHED / TARPED / DEE DEE. I could not find TARPED in any dictionary, so I changed it to TOP COPS / TOSHES / CARPET / SEETHE. TOSHES is a plural name, but there are at least two famous TOSHES out there, so I figured I was good with that corner. The SE corner had SO many versions until the final one.

I hope that people enjoy the result. Happy puzzling!

Neat findings, famous Greeks whose names can be split up for funny results. HIPPO CRATES reminds me of Bill and Ted calling Socrates "So-crates," so that was a nice laugh. ARI STOP HANES is such a cool one, and DEMOS THE NES is fun too. Pretty darn cool that Derek managed to find three examples that work so well — and fit into crossword-friendly symmetry!

I also (mostly) liked the idea behind GREEK PLAYS, i.e. wordplay. It's a real shame though that the clue for GREEK PLAYS referenced "Antigone," by Sophocles. Why not use one of ARISTOPHANES's plays? Granted, "The Birds" isn't nearly as famous as "Antigone," but given that ARISTOPHANES is right in the center of the puzzle …

Derek gives himself an audacious task with his grid — 67 words is very low. Granted, this 15x14 layout artificially lowers the word count by two or three, but still, it's easily in wide-open themeless territory. I worried when solving the NW and SE corners, as regions that big usually come with big compromises. To start with TOSHES isn't ideal (pluralized names are inelegant, and when there are only two of them ...), but the rest of the NW was all right. I don't remember TOP COPS — I couldn't find much about it (is it a cult classic?). There's nothing amazing up there, but nothing truly awful either.

I was pleasantly surprised by the SE, too. Hard not to like a puzzle with SEATTLE in it. Again, there's nothing that wowed me, but with only ESSES, TARE (which is a term we use in engineering all the time), and the outdated PESETA (man, that's a giant number of A, E, S, and Ts!), the corner works. I prefer more snazzy entries — the type you'd usually see in themelesses — but this very low word-count does work as a change of pace. It is pretty cool to have SO many 6- and 7-letter entries interlocking in those corners.

A very cool finding to discover three famous Greek people that have such fun wordplay.