Rex Parker Does The Nyt Crossword Puzzle Today (2024)

FAQs

What is the hardest day of the NYT crossword? ›

Clues. Clues should reflect the difficulty of the puzzle. Our difficulty scale increases through the week, with the easiest puzzles on Monday and hardest on Saturday.

The crosswords are designed to increase in difficulty throughout the week, with the easiest on Monday and the most difficult on Saturday. The larger Sunday crossword, which appears in The New York Times Magazine, is an icon in American culture; it is typically intended to be a "Thursday-plus" in difficulty.

Pick out the clues that are meant to be the easiest and tackle them first. See anything you definitely know? There's no better boost to your solving ego than filling in a few entries right off the bat. You can confirm whether an answer is right by solving the entries that cross it.

21A. “Extremely damaged, in military lingo” is FUBAR, a word that began as an acronym but whose words are too risqué to write out in a Times column. (The last three words are “beyond all recognition.”)

At an average finish time of nine minutes and twenty-four seconds over those 2,192 puzzles, that's roughly 20,589 minutes or 343 hours or 14.3 full days spent doing crossword puzzles, time enough to walk between a capital city founded in 1050 (OSLO) and a WWI battle locale (YSER).

The Saturday crossword is actually the hardest puzzle of the week. Mondays have the most straightforward clues and Saturday clues are the hardest, or involve the most wordplay. Contrary to popular belief, the Sunday puzzles are midweek difficulty, not the hardest. They're just bigger.

Tackle the easiest clues first.

Scan through the clues, and knock out all the easiest ones. Not only will this give your gameplay some structure, but also it'll give you an ego boost! Typically, fill-in-the-blank clues are the easiest. For example: “___ of Oz.”

As doing a puzzle helps to ease your body and mind, they can lead to more consistent sleeping habits. Stress and anxiety is a big cause of insomnia, so focusing on a good puzzle could be what you need to let your brain wind down before bed.

The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases that cross each other, by solving clues in the Across and Down columns which lead to the answers. The New York Times Crossword increases in difficulty from Monday to Saturday.

These features mean that crossword puzzles cause large areas of your cortex to be active, and stimulate new connections in your brain. The hippocampus will then remember those new connections, strengthening both your hippocampus and cortex.

What does rebus mean in the nyt crossword? ›

According to The New York Times crosswords editor, Will Shortz, “A 'rebus' in a crossword is anything that gets entered in a square that's not a single letter of the alphabet.” That can mean you have to jam more than one letter into a square or use digits.

Force = f, n. Former = ex. Fort = ft. French = fr.

FUBAR is an acronym that originated in the military, which stands for a situation that is so damaged or out of control that it is "f*cked up beyond all recognition," or alternatively, "f*cked up beyond all repair." According to Techopedia, FUBAR was popularized by American soldiers during the Second World War.

The standard "NATO" phonetic alphabet (actually the International Radio-Telephony Spelling Alphabet) is: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.

5 Letters: TROOP.

The New York Times Crossword increases in difficulty from Monday to Saturday. The Sunday puzzle is approximately on the same difficulty level as the Wednesday or Thursday puzzle, and is larger than other daily puzzles.

About LA Times Crossword

Edited by Patti Varol, the LA Times Crossword puzzle is full of music, TV, and film references. This typically themeless crossword puzzle gets harder as the week goes on.

Roger F Squires of Ironbridge in Telford, Shropshire, UK, has compiled and had published at least 77,854 crosswords as of 1 February 2015, equivalent to 2.34 million clues.

As you go, Connections should get easier. Once you've grouped one category, you have fewer words to choose from for the remaining three, and so on and so forth, until the game is over and you've won.