How to Solve the New York Times Crossword (2024)

FAQs

How to get better at the New York Times crossword puzzle? ›

Puzzle hack: Don't waste time puzzling over clues that you can't solve right away. Pick out the easier clues – what you know and fill-in-the-blanks clues – and solve those first. tl;dr: Check your answer by seeing if you can correctly fill in the other entries that cross it.

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 as difficult as a Thursday puzzle.

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.

If you are stuck on a word, select the lifesaver icon at the top of the puzzle to check or reveal a square, an answer, or the entire puzzle: Clear - Clear the entire puzzle to start again. Reveal - Reveal the correct letters for a square, an answer, or the entire puzzle.

I got rejected probably 15, 16-plus times — it's about a 3 percent acceptance rate to get published there. They get 200 submissions a week for seven spots. Eventually, last year, they accepted the Monday puzzle, which ran in August. And then, in October, they wrote back, and we worked on this Sunday puzzle together.

In case you didn't know, the daily New York Times Crossword has a difficulty curve as the week goes on. Monday is the easiest puzzle, and then Tuesday is a little harder, climbing up to Saturday, which is the hardest day of the week.

Monday is the easiest and Saturday is the hardest, with Sunday puzzles being larger and having the difficulty of about a Thursday puzzle. The biggest jump in difficulty is from Tuesday and Wednesday as the words get longer and longer and the clues get trickier. Hope this helps.

The Monday crosswords are the easiest, and the puzzles get harder as the week goes on. Practice on the Mondays before pushing yourself to Tuesday puzzles. The Saturday crossword is the hardest of the week. Contrary to popular belief, Sunday puzzles have the difficulty level of a midweek crossword.

Although not present in all crossword types, circles are typically placed around letter squares in crosswords to refer to squares that will form part of a theme. After solving the crossword, the circled letters can be combined together to spell a word associated with the theme, or name the theme itself.

WEDNESDAY PUZZLE — The small dashes in a puzzle's list of clues can signify a number of things. They can refer to the name of a symbol: a dash, a minus sign or a hyphen, for example.

How to enter rebus in nyt crossword app? ›

Tap the More key on the bottom left-hand side of the screen. Step 2: Tap the Rebus key on the bottom right-hand side of the screen. This will open a larger square in which you can type multiple letters. Step 3: Type in the letters and then tap anywhere inside the grid to close and save your rebus.

Make guesses.

Sometimes when you're stuck, the only way to move forward is to make an educated guess and see how that affects the puzzle. Lightly pencil in the letters you're uncertain about so that you know to confirm them later.

Scoring 100% on

The answer is acing.

Our difficulty scale increases through the week, with the easiest puzzles on Monday and hardest on Saturday. Sunday puzzles should reflect midweek difficulty levels. Clues should be fresh, colorful and precise.