New York Times, Tuesday, September 9, 2025

This puzzle's theme was inspired by Jeff Chen's commentary on this website! Jeff is an incredibly prolific and accomplished constructor, so his commentary was a tremendous resource when I was learning about crossword construction. One puzzle had the entry TETE-A-TETE, which Jeff noted appears commonly, partly thanks to its "perfect vowel-consonant symmetry" which is friendly to construct around. I thought to myself, "I wonder if I could make a whole puzzle with alternating vowels!" I was working on a puzzle with a similar theme at the time, which was published in the NYT on January 16, 2024 (my debut puzzle!). If you liked today's puzzle, you should solve that one if you haven't already.

Other than VOWEL as a revealer, the grid was a blank slate which can be both a blessing and a curse. I opted for this grid with the two double stacks which quickly resolved my blank slate "problem." They were tricky to wrangle, but too striking and irresistible to pass up. I iterated on and off for over a year before happily submitting this version. Hope you enjoyed it!

I used a regex query along with Adam Aaronson's invaluable Wordlisted tool to modify my wordlist. Some numbers: Only 5% of my wordlist has alternating vowels, but that's mostly driven by the longer words: While 29% of 3-, 4-, and 5-letter words have alternating vowels, only 14 out of nearly 13,000 (or 0.1%) 15-letter words have alternating vowels. Of those 14, only 3 (!) begin with a vowel (the other one was ON A POSITIVE NOTE). Being able to stack two pairs of those 15-letter words in a relatively open grid with a limited wordlist demonstrates just how useful that vowel pattern is to constructors. Interestingly, I had nearly the opposite constraint in my first NYT puzzle, where the short fill was significantly more impacted than the long fill.

Cluing answers like FEMALE is fraught. 39-Down is an interesting option. Back in 1955, the clue could be "The intuitive sex."

Marshal's RegEx query returns too many results, but you can narrow it down using the options in the yellow box. Sort by score to see the most interesting ones first, or select a specific length for the slot you're trying to fill. 15's that alternate vowels and consonants include MEXICAN AMERICAN, PUNITIVE DAMAGES, and RICE WINE VINEGAR. The only 21 that fits the pattern in NYT history is this quote from Aristotle.

Click Analyze below to see the lovely green/white checkerboard in the Thumbnails section showing the consonant/vowel distribution.

There was another such puzzle in 2018.