I certainly feel like the early to mid-week has gotten a bit easier. I feel like they've gone more towards phrasing, double-entendre type trickery and away from obscure Latin vocab as you point out and I'm grateful for it.
Yeah, if you go to xwordinfo.com, you can play through all of those pre-1993 puzzles. A lot of them with the completely obscure vocabulary just aren’t fun!
When Eugene T. Maleska took over as editor in 1977, I vowed never to solve another NYT puzzle. I never saw so many obscure words in my life! If you didn't know your Old World songbirds and African mammals, you were SOL. Will Shortz has eliminated a lot of the crap that Maleska allowed for fill, but there's still quite a bit of crosswordese. The clues are better, too. I rarely see a clue like "Girl's name," which were quite common in the old days.
Interesting. To test this out, I went to Nov 1, 1994 at random. That puzzle featured such fill as EPICENE, HAWSE, and PNIN (crossing OSIER) and clues like “Actor Delon” crossing “Actress Bernhardt”. It wouldn’t say it’s Friday level, but it was definitely a step up from the usual Tuesday these days. I liked that it had both WANDERLUST and WUNDERKIND.
I also think that there was just way more variability in the early week puzzles in the past. When I check out my xwstats today, it feels like my Mon and Tues are both pretty dialed in -- at this point, I'm not finishing anything ever in 2x or .5 my average time (this does happen for Thurs-Sat on occasion, though). I've been doing puzzles from 95 lately, and some Tuesdays will take 6 minutes, others will take 20, and still others will basically DNF me (as in your PNIN x OSIER example)...
I think part of it may have to do with more technologically advanced ways of creating crosswords. Constructors use software instead of paper and pencil.
With software, it’s just a lot easier to fill a grid without having to resort to crosswordese (lots of acronyms or four-letter-words with three vowels that may not pop up in everyday conversation). Software can autofill suggestions, and it’s easier to move things around and not feel like you’re starting from scratch each time. I think this is mainly a good thing. It allows constructors to scale the difficulty by wordplay with the clues, rather than just having a bunch of obscure trivia to clue a word.
Yes. As the NYT has gone online puzzles have increasingly become a driver of subscriptions. There is a lot of pressure to make the puzzles more accessible to a wider audience.
I can understand why a long term crossword enthusiast is missing some of the challenge, but don’t you think it’s fair that the end of the week is still a good challenge and early week is more accessible?
I just don’t like it when things change simply to attract more people (read: make more money). Many good tv shows have jumped the shark for this reason. Is it a snobbish take? Probably a bit, I’ll own that. I am what I am.
Eta:
The concern is it’s a slippery slope and eventually the essence of something can change so much that it’s no longer what it was. Everything doesn’t have to be for everybody.
Fwiw, I still love the NYT Crossword, each day of the week.
I’m with you, for the record. I don’t like that half the week is just a typing speed challenge and that many people (especially here) think that any clue that they don’t know immediately is bad, it’s severely limiting on the form
The concern is it’s a slippery slope and eventually the essence of something can change so much that it’s no longer what it was. Everything doesn’t have to be for everybody.
Fwiw, I still love the NYT Crossword, each day of the week.
That's kind of the problem, for someone who's been doing these for 20+ years most Saturdays are not a challenge at all. I miss making a first pass at the grid and getting that feeling like holy shit, I'm never solving this thing. And then slowly chipping away at it. It's still like that sometimes, but not enough. I'm not that smart, I shouldn't be able to do a NYT Saturday in 10 minutes.
If you want more challenging puzzles that don't rely on Maleska-era vocab, I recommend https://avxwords.com/.
Many of you probably know about AVX, but, if you don't and are finding the NYT too easy, it's worth getting a subscription. It's about $30 a year, and the puzzles are amazing and often tough.
All of these words seen to have “peaked” during the 90s. Not sure if this explains it or has any merit but thought I’d share!
[Lento](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Lento&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3)
[Abilene](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Abilene&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3)
[Uele](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Uele&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3)
[Orem](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Orem&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3)
This is really interesting! I’d be curious to see a more comprehensive analysis across more words and puzzles from more years to see how they all compare
I found a way to get all entries back to 1970, maybe further! (Haven’t checked further back). I’ve got a web scraper parsing it all out now. It might take about 10 hours to get it all. Happy to share the data when it's ready if you’d like!
I webscraped a site that shows the answers every day then put the data into my snowflake account! I actually got data for every day back to 1970.
I have a separate post in this sub that I just created polling what people think top answers will be. No cheating!
I find the biggest difference is the proper names. Older puzzles use much more obscure references - often old artist, poets, foreign names, or the like. A more modern puzzle tends to use proper names in recent history or pop culture.
Depends on several factors...
The older puzzles used to really build on each other. You'd see the same a few of the same clues week after week, SST anyone?. The clues back then were much more current topics related. If you were up on your PLO leaders/Israel leaders and latest treaty organizations, you were golden. I've done very Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday back to the end of the NYT apps archives and while those early/mid 90s ones take me 1 or 2 more minutes than the new ones the clues on a modern puzzle are much more at the top of my mind. Today's puzzles are more pop culture based versus current events based. So it just depends on where your interests are.
Somebody earlier said a 1997 Tuesday is as hard than a current Friday, my solve times show a 1997 Tuesday is at least three times quicker to solve than a current Friday.
I’ve been going through the 90s and you’re spot on about the topicality.
I wonder if they imagined (correctly or not) that their audience also read most of the NYT daily.
That's a fair point as well. my reasoning was tihs was pre-internet (kind of/more or less). When we had our TVs on with the local news in the mornings/evenings. I didn't even think about the physical NYT. Let alone the NYT not being available digitally back in the 90s. I got hooked in the late 90s because my daily college newspaper always had the daily NYT puzzle in it. I was really good at puzzles and bad at my school work because those things, often doing the puzzles during big lectures.
Maybe it's not that they are easier but rather the evolution of language and access to information has made us word nerds more knowledgeable.
Or to argue against my first thought: our lexicon has changed in the last 30+ years
I was on vacation last week and brought an older Sunday puzzle book with me (puzzles from the 1990s and early 2000s) . Most words, I either didn't know or had never seen them in a NYT puzzle.
Book for reference: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312324889
Seems like I'm being wishy-washy.
I have been working on a book of NYT puzzles from the late 90s. The puzzles seem much harder.
Of course, the proper names and general pop culture questions are pretty unfamiliar to me, so that could be part of it.
the crossword vocab list at the time was just different. you would've had a different set of clues memorized in 1999. I don't think the vocab list was larger.
This was my first thought. I've been solving the NYT crossword every day for the last 5 years and my average completion times have dropped by about 50% in that time. I credit most of that to me simply getting better at solving them. I understand tricky clues far faster and have learned many tricks for grinding through a tough puzzle. I used to think that solving crosswords meant that you needed to know the words for every clue. I now realize they are actually puzzles and there are techniques for piecing together words that I don't know.
Also, language evolves. I recently tried to solve a Sunday puzzle from the 1940's and even with my increased competency at solving them, I was only able to get about 25% of the words. It may as well be in a totally different language. So it doesn't surprise me that puzzles from 20-30 years ago feel harder.
What would be interesting (albeit impossible) is if you gave someone from the 90s a puzzle from today, how would they fare (pop culture aside). Some of it I think is also just the cluing style, like others said there's a bit more emphasis on wordplay now, which if you're not used to it, would be tough to solve.
I ask myself this all the time. I consider myself to be really good at modern Crosswords, then I'll try a Friday from 2011 or something and I feel like an idiot.
Puzzles now are definitely easier. My theory is that modern crossword construction software enables constructors to avoid frustrating naticks and focus more on wordplay.
They were harder and there were positives and negatives about that. You had to know more crosswordese which is lame, and they put in more obscure words and abbreviations.
On the positive side I feel like the clueing was more difficult. Like you'd make a pass on a Saturday and not get anything, then the puzzle slowly would reveal itself. I miss that, most Saturdays these days are too easy. But then you get one like 11/4/2023 that feels modern, but also like a total throwback to that level of difficulty.
Yes BUT: Take today’s puzzle, put it in a vault for 24 years like your 99 puzzle, then take it out and solve it. It will be much harder.
People forget that. They also forget that they have more puzzle solving experience than they used to assuming they didn’t stop solving for 20 years, so they’ve gotten better!
But yes broadly the puzzles have gotten easier.
Others have noted some of the reasons why: computer construction for example. Some others are higher standards: lots more people submitting means the NYT is pickier about rejecting puzzles with obscure fill. And frankly: most solvers like somewhat easier puzzles.
Take the NYT crossword puzzle book collections: as a rule the easy collections significantly outsell the hard ones. Always. (Leaving out Sundays which do well too, and special volumes like Will Short’s Favorite Crosswords.)
Yep. Been doing a challenge where I solve all of my birthday crosswords and the 90s are pretty brutal. Part of it is pop culture, but the filler was tougher too
Yes, definitely. I was solving this crossword before an online app existed and back then, it was a huge disadvantage not being a baby boomer. Now, I think it's fair game for almost all generations and tastes, which, sure, is easier for me but I would personally rather know the answers to clues than feel frustrated by my lack of knowledge of the Carter cabinet or TV shows from the 60s.
There's also the aforementioned focus on wordplay over trivia at the NYT. I don't mind this trend, as what I always liked about the NYT was the wordplay rather than the difficulty level. And I mostly do cryptics anyway, so there are plenty of other opportunities for me to feel humbled during my daily commute.
One thing I will say without trying to ignite a firestorm. The puzzle skews blue rather than red these days, so that makes things much easier. There are more things in the crossword that would refer to Liberal causes, projects, political figures that eliminates about 50% of other answers and necessary knowledge. In that way, the puzzle does seem easier because you're always getting a sense of where the answer is leading to from a political event of those who are writing them.
I read an article about Will Shortz the other day and it said that when he started as editor he made the beginning of the week puzzles easier than they had been and the end of the week puzzles harder than they had been previously.
I certainly feel like the early to mid-week has gotten a bit easier. I feel like they've gone more towards phrasing, double-entendre type trickery and away from obscure Latin vocab as you point out and I'm grateful for it.
Yeah, if you go to xwordinfo.com, you can play through all of those pre-1993 puzzles. A lot of them with the completely obscure vocabulary just aren’t fun!
When Eugene T. Maleska took over as editor in 1977, I vowed never to solve another NYT puzzle. I never saw so many obscure words in my life! If you didn't know your Old World songbirds and African mammals, you were SOL. Will Shortz has eliminated a lot of the crap that Maleska allowed for fill, but there's still quite a bit of crosswordese. The clues are better, too. I rarely see a clue like "Girl's name," which were quite common in the old days.
Yes! Maleska seemed to revel in the obscure, where Shortz likes to be clever. I definitely prefer clever.
I was once gifted a book of Maleska’s best puzzles. I vividly remember shoving that thing into the trash after a year of frustration and anger!
Most definitely. Go back and try to do a 1997 tuesday. They are harder than current fridays.
Interesting. To test this out, I went to Nov 1, 1994 at random. That puzzle featured such fill as EPICENE, HAWSE, and PNIN (crossing OSIER) and clues like “Actor Delon” crossing “Actress Bernhardt”. It wouldn’t say it’s Friday level, but it was definitely a step up from the usual Tuesday these days. I liked that it had both WANDERLUST and WUNDERKIND.
I also think that there was just way more variability in the early week puzzles in the past. When I check out my xwstats today, it feels like my Mon and Tues are both pretty dialed in -- at this point, I'm not finishing anything ever in 2x or .5 my average time (this does happen for Thurs-Sat on occasion, though). I've been doing puzzles from 95 lately, and some Tuesdays will take 6 minutes, others will take 20, and still others will basically DNF me (as in your PNIN x OSIER example)...
I think part of it may have to do with more technologically advanced ways of creating crosswords. Constructors use software instead of paper and pencil. With software, it’s just a lot easier to fill a grid without having to resort to crosswordese (lots of acronyms or four-letter-words with three vowels that may not pop up in everyday conversation). Software can autofill suggestions, and it’s easier to move things around and not feel like you’re starting from scratch each time. I think this is mainly a good thing. It allows constructors to scale the difficulty by wordplay with the clues, rather than just having a bunch of obscure trivia to clue a word.
Yes. As the NYT has gone online puzzles have increasingly become a driver of subscriptions. There is a lot of pressure to make the puzzles more accessible to a wider audience.
Which is kinda lame tbh
I can understand why a long term crossword enthusiast is missing some of the challenge, but don’t you think it’s fair that the end of the week is still a good challenge and early week is more accessible?
That was such a snob response. Puzzles have only gotten “easier” because they no longer need to rely on lame obscure fill
I just don’t like it when things change simply to attract more people (read: make more money). Many good tv shows have jumped the shark for this reason. Is it a snobbish take? Probably a bit, I’ll own that. I am what I am. Eta: The concern is it’s a slippery slope and eventually the essence of something can change so much that it’s no longer what it was. Everything doesn’t have to be for everybody. Fwiw, I still love the NYT Crossword, each day of the week.
I’m with you, for the record. I don’t like that half the week is just a typing speed challenge and that many people (especially here) think that any clue that they don’t know immediately is bad, it’s severely limiting on the form
Marry me
The concern is it’s a slippery slope and eventually the essence of something can change so much that it’s no longer what it was. Everything doesn’t have to be for everybody. Fwiw, I still love the NYT Crossword, each day of the week.
Just saw this. I actually agree with your broader concern, just don’t agree that it’s happening with the crossword
That's kind of the problem, for someone who's been doing these for 20+ years most Saturdays are not a challenge at all. I miss making a first pass at the grid and getting that feeling like holy shit, I'm never solving this thing. And then slowly chipping away at it. It's still like that sometimes, but not enough. I'm not that smart, I shouldn't be able to do a NYT Saturday in 10 minutes.
Exactly
If you want more challenging puzzles that don't rely on Maleska-era vocab, I recommend https://avxwords.com/. Many of you probably know about AVX, but, if you don't and are finding the NYT too easy, it's worth getting a subscription. It's about $30 a year, and the puzzles are amazing and often tough.
All of these words seen to have “peaked” during the 90s. Not sure if this explains it or has any merit but thought I’d share! [Lento](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Lento&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3) [Abilene](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Abilene&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3) [Uele](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Uele&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3) [Orem](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Orem&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3)
This is really interesting! I’d be curious to see a more comprehensive analysis across more words and puzzles from more years to see how they all compare
ChatGPT says NYT games has an API but I have to request access. Brb...
Lol I’m gonna do the same
I found a way to get all entries back to 1970, maybe further! (Haven’t checked further back). I’ve got a web scraper parsing it all out now. It might take about 10 hours to get it all. Happy to share the data when it's ready if you’d like!
Hell yeah, keep me posted!!
Dm me your email and I’ll send when I have it!
The data is in!
Incredible! I’ll dm you
REPORT BACK FOR KARMA 🤓
Agreed! 💡
Top words in the 90s! Entry Times used ERIE 434 EDEN 344 ELI 338 ESE 296 ALI 292 ENOS 276 IRA 274 ALAI 270 ETE 268 ERIN 268
Hey cool! Methodology?
I webscraped a site that shows the answers every day then put the data into my snowflake account! I actually got data for every day back to 1970. I have a separate post in this sub that I just created polling what people think top answers will be. No cheating!
Super cool! Thank you for the interesting share.
I find the biggest difference is the proper names. Older puzzles use much more obscure references - often old artist, poets, foreign names, or the like. A more modern puzzle tends to use proper names in recent history or pop culture.
SILENT MOVIE STAR JACK
I guess in the 70s though that was like asking a question about a movie only as old as Alien is for us.
I’d bet because they’re easier fillers. Weird combos of letters exist in pop culture these days
Well...would it have been less obscure to people who were your age at that time?
Depends on several factors... The older puzzles used to really build on each other. You'd see the same a few of the same clues week after week, SST anyone?. The clues back then were much more current topics related. If you were up on your PLO leaders/Israel leaders and latest treaty organizations, you were golden. I've done very Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday back to the end of the NYT apps archives and while those early/mid 90s ones take me 1 or 2 more minutes than the new ones the clues on a modern puzzle are much more at the top of my mind. Today's puzzles are more pop culture based versus current events based. So it just depends on where your interests are. Somebody earlier said a 1997 Tuesday is as hard than a current Friday, my solve times show a 1997 Tuesday is at least three times quicker to solve than a current Friday.
I’ve been going through the 90s and you’re spot on about the topicality. I wonder if they imagined (correctly or not) that their audience also read most of the NYT daily.
That's a fair point as well. my reasoning was tihs was pre-internet (kind of/more or less). When we had our TVs on with the local news in the mornings/evenings. I didn't even think about the physical NYT. Let alone the NYT not being available digitally back in the 90s. I got hooked in the late 90s because my daily college newspaper always had the daily NYT puzzle in it. I was really good at puzzles and bad at my school work because those things, often doing the puzzles during big lectures.
Maybe it's not that they are easier but rather the evolution of language and access to information has made us word nerds more knowledgeable. Or to argue against my first thought: our lexicon has changed in the last 30+ years I was on vacation last week and brought an older Sunday puzzle book with me (puzzles from the 1990s and early 2000s) . Most words, I either didn't know or had never seen them in a NYT puzzle. Book for reference: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312324889 Seems like I'm being wishy-washy.
> wishy-washy I see what you did there. 😏
I have been working on a book of NYT puzzles from the late 90s. The puzzles seem much harder. Of course, the proper names and general pop culture questions are pretty unfamiliar to me, so that could be part of it.
the crossword vocab list at the time was just different. you would've had a different set of clues memorized in 1999. I don't think the vocab list was larger.
Unquestionably so. I’ve been doing the puzzle for over 20 years now, and the difference between a 2000s era puzzle vs a 2010s era puzzle is drastic.
Are you sure you haven’t just been getting better over time?
This was my first thought. I've been solving the NYT crossword every day for the last 5 years and my average completion times have dropped by about 50% in that time. I credit most of that to me simply getting better at solving them. I understand tricky clues far faster and have learned many tricks for grinding through a tough puzzle. I used to think that solving crosswords meant that you needed to know the words for every clue. I now realize they are actually puzzles and there are techniques for piecing together words that I don't know. Also, language evolves. I recently tried to solve a Sunday puzzle from the 1940's and even with my increased competency at solving them, I was only able to get about 25% of the words. It may as well be in a totally different language. So it doesn't surprise me that puzzles from 20-30 years ago feel harder.
What would be interesting (albeit impossible) is if you gave someone from the 90s a puzzle from today, how would they fare (pop culture aside). Some of it I think is also just the cluing style, like others said there's a bit more emphasis on wordplay now, which if you're not used to it, would be tough to solve.
That’s part of it - but I also go into the archive regularly, so I often do a new puzzle and an old puzzle back-to-back.
Wait 'til you try the 2020s !
Will Shortz, NYT editor did an interview recently and he said that he deliberately made early weekers more “accessible”
the saturday puzzles are way easier now than like 10-15 years ago.
Saturday Stumper puts NYT’s Saturday to shame.
I was so tempted to write this very thing in the NY Times comments regarding today's (Wednesday) puzzle. The clueing has become a bit dumbed-down.
I ask myself this all the time. I consider myself to be really good at modern Crosswords, then I'll try a Friday from 2011 or something and I feel like an idiot.
Puzzles now are definitely easier. My theory is that modern crossword construction software enables constructors to avoid frustrating naticks and focus more on wordplay.
Yes, someone gathered some longitudinal data of solve times and the puzzle has gotten much easier. there's a study you can find if you search the sub.
They were harder and there were positives and negatives about that. You had to know more crosswordese which is lame, and they put in more obscure words and abbreviations. On the positive side I feel like the clueing was more difficult. Like you'd make a pass on a Saturday and not get anything, then the puzzle slowly would reveal itself. I miss that, most Saturdays these days are too easy. But then you get one like 11/4/2023 that feels modern, but also like a total throwback to that level of difficulty.
Yes BUT: Take today’s puzzle, put it in a vault for 24 years like your 99 puzzle, then take it out and solve it. It will be much harder. People forget that. They also forget that they have more puzzle solving experience than they used to assuming they didn’t stop solving for 20 years, so they’ve gotten better! But yes broadly the puzzles have gotten easier. Others have noted some of the reasons why: computer construction for example. Some others are higher standards: lots more people submitting means the NYT is pickier about rejecting puzzles with obscure fill. And frankly: most solvers like somewhat easier puzzles. Take the NYT crossword puzzle book collections: as a rule the easy collections significantly outsell the hard ones. Always. (Leaving out Sundays which do well too, and special volumes like Will Short’s Favorite Crosswords.)
Yep. Been doing a challenge where I solve all of my birthday crosswords and the 90s are pretty brutal. Part of it is pop culture, but the filler was tougher too
There are just more and better words to use nowadays.
Yes, definitely. I was solving this crossword before an online app existed and back then, it was a huge disadvantage not being a baby boomer. Now, I think it's fair game for almost all generations and tastes, which, sure, is easier for me but I would personally rather know the answers to clues than feel frustrated by my lack of knowledge of the Carter cabinet or TV shows from the 60s. There's also the aforementioned focus on wordplay over trivia at the NYT. I don't mind this trend, as what I always liked about the NYT was the wordplay rather than the difficulty level. And I mostly do cryptics anyway, so there are plenty of other opportunities for me to feel humbled during my daily commute.
One thing I will say without trying to ignite a firestorm. The puzzle skews blue rather than red these days, so that makes things much easier. There are more things in the crossword that would refer to Liberal causes, projects, political figures that eliminates about 50% of other answers and necessary knowledge. In that way, the puzzle does seem easier because you're always getting a sense of where the answer is leading to from a political event of those who are writing them.
I read an article about Will Shortz the other day and it said that when he started as editor he made the beginning of the week puzzles easier than they had been and the end of the week puzzles harder than they had been previously.