The New York Times enraged cruciverbalists (a 15-letter word for people who enjoy solving crossword puzzles) everywhere after the grid published in its Sunday magazine editions simply didn’t line up.
“Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues,” the outlet’s communications team wrote in a statement given via X. “The correct version of the puzzle can be found in the news section of Sunday’s print edition of The Times. The puzzle on our app is correct.”
The admission did little to assuage the displeasure of crossword enthusiasts on the app.
“Can you please post the correct clues somewhere online, for Free ?? I’ve already paid $6 (as I have Every Sun since 1980) I only keep the Magazine & give the paper away so the corrected list on pg 25 is of no use & by the time I can get back to the store they’ll be sold out,” wrote one person.
Another noted they spent far too long on a puzzle that was ultimately unsolvable.
“I eventually gave up on the gimmick,” they explained. “I filled in all the squares but didn’t bother to be precise. Got ‘last gasp’, but didn’t bother with the rest.”
The Times’ crossword puzzle was first printed in Februart 1942, approximately 30 years after such games gained popularity in the United States. The decision to add a puzzle to the paper appeared to be in part to give the nation something fun to think about after the December 1941 bombings at Pearl Harbor; the Sunday puzzle is now something of a mainstay in homes across the country.
“We ought to proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact that it is possible that there will now be bleak blackout hours — or if not that, then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind or other,” wrote Sunday editor Lester Markel at the time. “We ought not to try to do anything essentially different from what is now being done — except to do it better.”
In the 1990s, there were around 500 people who could be called upon to put together a good crossword puzzle. They were lawyers, professors, and housewives as well; at the time, an article by Richard F. Shepard said the only requirements were that they had “the talents of a poet and punster — limited only by the bounds of a good standard dictionary — and a willingness to keep it clean and tactful.”
In 2018 the Times announced it had over 400,000 subscribers to the crossword alone. Since then, the paper has added games including Worldle, Connections, Spelling Bee, and several version of the crossword to its app, and at least 9 million people have a subscription that allows them access.
