Intorduced Again as an Improved Product Crossword
Beyond the crossword
How Discussion Lists Aid — or Hurt — Crossword Puzzles
A look into how the words get chosen for the New York Times Crossword.
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If we were to go by the New York Times Crossword, Lake ERIE would be the most dazzling body of water on Globe. Mining ORE would be the nigh lucrative concern venture. According to xwordinfo.com, ERIE is the third most popular discussion in the New York Times Crossword. It has appeared over one,350 times. ORE is seventh, with over ane,200 appearances.
ORE and ERIE are examples of crosswordese, words that appear oftentimes in crossword puzzles simply rarely in solar day-to-day conversation. One of the reasons they appear and then often is because they are extremely useful in crossword construction. The alternating pattern of vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant makes for easy filling of tricky corners or catastrophe stacks.
For a long time, the main tools of a crossword constructor were graph paper and a dictionary. Amongst today's constructors, though, it's hard to find someone who doesn't use software such every bit Crossfire or Crossword Compiler to create their puzzles. These programs introduced a new tool that automatically fills in an area of a crossword puzzle using a give-and-take list. By using autofill, a constructor'south task is fabricated easier. But as a result, crosswordese is stuck in the pre-Internet era.
Most structure programs come with preinstalled give-and-take lists, but they also permit the user to create their own, or to import lists downloaded from the internet. There are a number of free and paid discussion lists floating around, ranging in size from a few hundred entries to several hundred thousand. Every constructor I spoke to mentioned these word lists were a huge boon when they were first starting out.
The higher a word is scored in a list, the more than likely the software is to use it. The internet word lists tend to place a college weight on words that have appeared in published puzzles before, and so crosswordese like ORE and ERIE tends to appear disproportionately oftentimes. Every constructor has a dissimilar methodology for scoring their personal word list, the same way a painter may adopt ane brush or pigment over another.
A number of constructors said they felt that crossword puzzles were art, or at the very least a form of cocky-expression. Everyone can download a word list, just how they utilise it is what makes information technology special, and a good word listing cannot replace the skill and feedback necessary to make a slap-up puzzle.
Some constructors set up aside time just for sharpening the scoring of their discussion lists. For example, Amanda Rafkin, associate puzzle and games editor at Andrews McMeel Universal, told me that she sometimes spent two or three hours just rescoring words in her word list.
Matt Ginsberg, who has published 50 puzzles in The New York Times, told me he used a car learning algorithm to score his discussion list, and constantly scraped websites such as Wikipedia and online dictionaries to find words to add to his drove. However, Mr. Ginsberg also mentioned that this style of word list direction could sometimes make his puzzles feel "synthetic," and that he envied constructors who used language that was more personal to them.
Constructors will as well prune their word lists to keep out words they don't desire in their puzzles.
"There are a lot of rivers, and I don't know them all, even if they take a lot of good letters in them," said Kate Hawkins, who has had seven puzzles published in The New York Times. "If I would exist displeased to see information technology in a puzzle, I have information technology out. If I think information technology's offensive, I accept it out. If I call back something is just meh, I accept it out."
Ms. Hawkins likes to add together what she calls "utility language" into her word listing. "I really like signs and instructions in the world around you," she said, "words and phrases that you lot encounter, and they're ubiquitous, they're not in word lists." An example she gave me was her puzzle with the phrase LANE Airtight, which she added to her word listing after seeing information technology on a road sign.
A number of constructors too told me that they would remove a word if they thought an editor wouldn't accept a puzzle for including it. Ross Trudeau, who has published 40 puzzles in The New York Times, told me that since the list of words that editors find acceptable is merely so long, many constructors' give-and-take lists are actually very similar.
"Any new 3-, 4- or five-letter of the alphabet word is gold" and gets added to his word list immediately, Mr. Trudeau said. A recent case he gave was PSAKI, as in the White House printing secretary Jen PSAKI. He gives extra weight to new jargon, picture show titles and especially annihilation that he thinks will generate interesting theme or revealer entries.
"As a human, your tastes modify, it all depends on how the pieces stack up as a whole," said Sam Ezersky, a New York Times digital puzzle editor and a constructor. "A word list isn't going to tell you that at that place are 2 really difficult answers crossing each other."
When Mr. Ezersky is stuck in a tricky part of a grid he is constructing, he uses answers such as AC TO DC or ATOMIC GAS. Crunchy phrases like these might not appear in a normal give-and-take listing, but with some clever cluing, they can work well to glue together some smoother fill.
Editors like Mr. Ezerky are looking for those moments.
"We can tell when some human being, meticulous idea went into a puzzle," he said. "We love when it truly feels similar a arts and crafts, something that a man designed."
There are resources for constructors looking to diversify their word lists, such as the Expanded Crossword Name Database. The database was created past Erica Hsiung Wojcik, a Skidmore College professor and a crossword constructor, as a manner to increase representation in give-and-take lists later on she noticed white men were overrepresented in crossword grids.
Some database inclusions are things that seemed like obvious puzzle words to Ms. Wojcik. For example, the ERHU is a two-stringed instrument with Chinese roots with a spelling that lends itself to being crosswordese, but at the time of writing, it has never appeared in the New York Times Crossword. Meanwhile, ED ASNER, an actor best known for playing Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran in the 1970s, has appeared in the New York Times crossword 41 times. His terminal name? I hundred and l-one times.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/crosswords/wordlists-for-constructing-puzzles.html
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