New York Times, Thursday, October 20, 2011

Analysis

There are 15 rows and 15 columns, with 8 rebus squares, and 4 cheater squares (marked with "+" in the colorized grid below.)

It has normal rotational symmetry.

Puzzle has 2 fill-in-the-blank clues and 0 cross-reference clues.

This puzzle has 5 unique answer words.

It has 1 word that debuted in this puzzle and was later reused:

These words are unique to the Modern Era but have appeared in pre-Shortz puzzles:

These 28 answer words are not legal Scrabble™ entries, which sometimes means they are interesting:

Day of week comparisons

Distribution of answer words by length

Letter distribution

Thumbnails

Various thumbnail views are shown:

• Standard view shows the grid pattern most clearly
• Open Squares (those which don't touch any block, even diagonally) are blue
• Vowel distribution
• Scrabble score uses the same color key as above
• Freshness view shows unique answers in red (see colorized grid below)

With answers

Puzzles that may be similar to this one

Crosswords that share the most words with this one (excluding Sundays):

Unusual or long words that appear elsewhere:

Identical grids

Other puzzles with the same block pattern as this one:

Topologically similar grids

Other crosswords with exactly 40 blocks, 78 words, 65 open squares, and an average word length of 5.56:

Colorized grid for Thu Oct 20, 2011

The next two sections attempt to show how fresh the grid entries are.

In this view, unusual answers are colored depending on how often they have appeared in other puzzles.
Unique answers are in red, red overwrites orange which overwrites yellow, etc.

Cheater squares are indicated with a + sign.

Freshness Factor

Freshness Factor is a calculation that compares the number of times words in this puzzle have appeared in other Modern Era puzzles.
Click here for an explanation.

The chart below shows how many times each word has been used across all NYT puzzles, old and modern including Variety.