Cruciverbalism and cruciverbalism-adjacent
Just a couple of quick notes. It’s the depths of winter and I’ve had some time off, so I’m playing with puzzles. I kind of like Wordle. I don’t play to win as quickly as possible. I like to throw unusual words at it, on the off chance that it will result in a lucky punch.
I sent the picture above to a friend who also likes Wordle with the note:
“There are probably not a lot of people who unironically and eminently hopefully guess “capon” before they’re forced to remember that “bacon” would also have worked.”
Sometimes I deliberately try guessing as “badly” as possible to see how long I can keep the field gray, using up as many letters as possible before solving it. For example, if you look at the keyboard, there is really only one solution remaining, given the revealed letters. The solution has to be CAL_E of CA_LE, with the letters shown on the keyboard (or C, A, L, E). It could have been “calve”, but “cable” seemed like the better bet. The Wordle almost never uses a fancy word like “calve” (either because of its relation to proletarian animal-husbandry, or because of its relation to climate-change, with glaciers “calving”).
I finished another recent Wordle in three steps by first guessing Quest, then Emoji, then was quite surprised to find that Evoke was actually the answer.
Update 15.04.2025: we hit 1000 puzzles today. 🫰 we can tie our streak tomorrow.
In Spelling Bee news, I continue to add to a list of real words that the puzzle does not recognize. I’m up to over 150 of them. My most recent addition is phaeton.
I also did a couple recently that had very few words and points.
And, finally, the actual crossword advertised in the title. My partner and I have a very long streak going—almost five years—and we’ve amassed quite a lot of statistics. I generally don’t do Monday-Wednesday because those are the easy ones. Again, because I have more free time—and I’m currently six hours ahead of my partner—I gave Monday a shot for Christmas. I wanted to set a record time.
I was pretty pleased with myself. 4:20 is very fast. I was certain that I’d just set the record. Unfortunately, the NY Times has stored some unusual numbers.
We’ve never solved a Monday puzzle in 1:15. That’s pretty much impossible, I think, unless you already knows the answers and are just transcribing them into the game interface. I could see that the record for Tuesday is 4:21, so I beat that one, at least, if only by a second. 😉
Finally, I just noticed that I had an old screenshot lying around of our average times when we were still at a 765-day streak.
I compared to a recent screenshot, at 1710 days, and the daily averages haven’t moved much, a few a bit slower, a few a bit faster.
Here we are, almost a year later, at 2047 days, and the daily averages are still stable.
And here we are, at just over six years.
We’re getting better and better. Some days go really well. Here’s a recent Saturday, where we almost equalled our all-time record of 07:50 with a strong showing of 09:44.
Connections
There’s another game called Connections that involves grouping 16 words into four groups of four words. I always try to solve them in reverse order of difficulty, from hardest to easiest. The most difficult group is purple and is usually easy to spot because it almost always involves a common prefix or suffix. If you’ve got a group without a prefix or suffix, then it’s probably not the purple group.
The next three groups aren’t always so easy to distinguish. I’ve quite often been surprised to see a grouping that I thought was pretty obvious marked as “blue” (second-hardest). I’ve since learned that the NYT has a very specific view of the world: they think that anything to do with the proletariat—video games, TV shows, sports (especially sports)—is difficult. The other day, they had “WNBA teams” as the blue group…which is fair, actually. No-one knows those. Except me, baby.
Homophones
I was particularly proud of having gotten this purple grouping, which was a rare “homophone” one:
- Purple: Indy, Mettle, Seoul, Wrap were “Homophones of music genres”
- Blue: Greyhound, Caterpillar, Puma, and Dove were “Companies named after animals”
- Green: Squeeze, Shoehorn, Wedge, Sandwich were “Cram”
- Yellow: Belt, Slug, Blow, Sock were “Punch”
Things featuring tails
Another puzzle we recently had was rated the hardest I’d ever seen, with only 33% of about a ¼-million players even finishing the puzzle, and only 4% finishing it without a mistake—and probably far fewer completing it with a “reverse rainbow.”
Here’s the summary, noting that the puzzle was “exceptionally tricky” with a “5/5 Difficulty”.
Connections No. 581 was 'exceptionally tricky'
There are more detailed ratings as well. Here, you can see which percentile you landed in and can see the breakdown of how many points you get for completing a puzzle with no mistakes, and then bonus points you get for completing the puzzle with savoir faire. In this case, the “reverse rainbow” means that you solved the puzzle in decreasing level of difficulty, which is much more difficult because it means that you have to solve all of the combinations at once without clearing any of them out of the way.
Update: 2025-05-29: I was just thinking today that getting a reverse rainbow is not just knowledge of correlations between words but also tests empathy. You have to not only get into the heads of other puzzle solvers, trying to figure out what they think might consider difficult—e.g., when trying to determine which group of four words is “green” and which four are “easier” and therefore “yellow”—but what the people who make the puzzle think would be easier or more difficult for their readers. That is, everyone’s making assumptions about context and knowledge in other people, triangulating toward the reverse rainbow.
Purple is often extending the four words with another word. But blue is often something to do with science or engineering—which are anathema to NYT readers—or more-obscure vocabulary. What counts as obscure vocabulary is often somewhat shocking if you’re widely and well-read. You also have to take into account that younger generations read other things—or don’t read much at all. So they won’t have encountered words that I consider to be normal, having grown up with them.
There’s also the people who are doing this whole thing in what is still their non-native language, even if they’ve long since become fluent in English. The missing cultural cues are crucial.
All in all, “reverse rainbow” add an extra layer of difficulty to Connections that ends up flexing muscles other than knowledge of trivia and ability to correlate or find patterns.
Update: 2025-07-17: The example below shows what happens when the New York Times follows its regular pattern only some of the time.
The purple was tough—Kath got it—and very clearly the purple. But who in the name of God was going to guess that people at the New York Times think that knowing the names of Sharp Fasteners is really hard? Or that they think that their cohort of solvers wouldn’t know what “brads” or “tacks” are? How in the name of God is that blue? We knew that sports was tough for Upper East Siders—who would rather die than watch football, unless they’re doing it ironically or from a skybox—but we didn’t think the clues were that tought, so we went with “water comes from a faucet, right?”
Ratings for Connections No. 581
Finally, here is the puzzle itself.
Connections No. 581 perfect solution
- Purple: Coin toss, Comets, Dress Coat, and Sonic the Hedgehog were “Things featuring tails”
- Blue: Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede, and Defender were “Classic Atari games”
- Green: Charm, Court, Pursue, and Romance were “Woo”
- Yellow: Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Fiction, and Invention were “Fabrication”
Starting with European Capitals
On 30.01.2025,
Connections − Starting with European Capitals
- Purple: BERNIE, PARISH, RIGATONI, ROMEO were “Starting with European Capitals”
#1 songs from 1982
- Purple: ABRACADABRA, CENTERFOLD, MICKEY, PHYSICAL were “#1 songs from 1982”