american crosswords: an origin story
Around the beginning of November 2023 I solved my first American-style crosswords. I had been vaguely aware of this style of puzzle 1 previously, via images (including YouTube thumbnails) of NYT grids and the like, but my own crossword experience had all been with UK-style crosswords, the only kind I've seen run by Australian newspapers. I loved (and love!) cryptics in that style, but the "quick" or non-cryptic ones I encountered all paled in comparison, functioning as fairly bland vocabulary tests where if you got stuck, you were just stuck. I had always subconsciously assumed that the American-style puzzles would feel more or less the same, only with even fewer long/interesting words. When I started solving them it was because I had signed up for Puzzmo , where a midi-sized crossword was one of the daily puzzles. Actually solving these, instead of pre-judging them, made me realise how very unboring these crosswords could be. Every letter having two clues pointing to ...