Analysis

It has 2 words unique to this puzzle:

It has 0 additional words that debuted in this puzzle and were later reused (total number of puzzles in brackets):

These words have only appeared in pre-Shortz puzzles:

These 22 answer words are not legal Scrabble™ entries, which sometimes means they are interesting:

Distribution of answer words by length

Letter distribution

Thumbnails for 4/17/1972

Various thumbnail views are shown:

• Standard view shows the grid pattern most clearly
• Open Squares (those which don't touch any block, even diagonally) are blue
• Vowel distribution
• Scrabble score uses the same color key as above
• Freshness view shows unique answers in red (see colorized grid below)

With answers

Shortz Era puzzles that may be similar to this one

Crosswords that share the most words with this one (excluding Sundays):

Unusual or long words that appear elsewhere:

Identical grids

Other puzzles with the same block pattern as this one:

Topologically similar grids

Other crosswords with exactly 38 blocks, 78 words, 68 open squares, and an average word length of 4.79:

Colorized grid (based on pre-Shortz, Shortz Era and Variety word frequencies)

In this view, unusual answers are colored depending on how often they have appeared in other puzzles.
Unique answers are in red, red overwrites orange which overwrites yellow, etc.

Cheater squares are indicated with a + sign.

Freshness

How common is each answer word? This chart shows the number of puzzles each word has appeared in across all NYT puzzles, old and modern.