THREE-PEAT

Sometimes, you just need one word to get your crossword constructing juices flowing. For me, that word was "MISSISSIPPI," the letters of which were spelled out big and bold on a TV ad I saw last March. I immediately noticed the repeated, consecutive three-letter strings in M(ISS)(ISS)IPPI and wondered if there were other words with the same pattern. Up until then, however, my search queries had all been simple — using letters, asterisks, and question marks.

Fortunately, my Google searches led me to the Regex Dictionary and I found the following formula: ($c$c$v)\1 — and then I just interchanged the "c's" (consonants) and "v's" (vowels) within the same formula to find more words using the on-line Regex Dictionary and also the one found on XWord Info. Surprisingly, there were not a lot of single words with this pattern so I was happy to be able to find nine such words to incorporate into phrases for a Sunday puzzle.

Although I did come up with my concept and title independently, I discovered during my word searches that John Farmer's 10/16/2014 NYT puzzle had the same basic concept, except his repeated three-letter strings were at the end of one word and the beginning of another (e.g. SCARLETTER). Therefore, I felt confident that my "original" theme idea was still unique and was thrilled that Will and Joel apparently felt the same way.

Construction-wise, however, they were less than thrilled with my original grid, saying it was overly segmented with too many 4 and 5-letter words. Of the 140 words I had in the original grid, 111 words were 3's (22), 4's (44), and 5's (45). By shortening two of my theme entries and moving some black squares around, I was able to open up the grid and reduce the number of 3, 4, and 5's to 81 words out of 138, and add some longer, more interesting fill.

Hope you enjoy my second solo Sunday puzzle!

Theme phrases with three letters repeated, thus THREE-PEATs. Hopefully the NYT won't get a legal notice from Pat Riley, who trademarked the "three-peat" term in anticipation of his Lakers winning their third title in a row. (They failed, ha!)

I had seen some of these before, most notably MISSISSIPPI turned into MISS(ISS)IPPI, but Tracy found a couple nice ones. Obviously, CHEN REPUBLIC is my favorite. (My reign of power over the aforementioned country is a bit tenuous these days, what with a one-year old.) I couldn't quite figure out what the base answer was, so finally uncovering CHECHEN REPUBLIC (another name for Chechnya) was a neat moment.

I would have liked more of those neat moments, ones that really disguised the base phrase. It was a real challenge to figure out ENTE(NTE) CORDIALE for example, and I very much enjoyed that struggle. The rest came a bit too easily. I ran a quick query on my personal wordlist and came up with a few that could have been more challenging to uncover:

• BAR(BAR)Y PIRATES
• BEST (EST)IMATES
• COWBOYS AND I(NDI)ANS
• FEATHERS ONES (NES)T
• IT ALL MAKES SEN(SE N)OW
• NEAR (EAR)TH ORBIT
• PICKED UP THE C(HEC)K
• UC SANTA BAR(BAR)A

Some people pooh-pooh the idea of using coding to help with a crossword theme, but I'm all for it.

I liked a lot of the longer fill Tracy used. SMARTPHONE and TOUCH AND GO make a great pair of long downs, and AT LEISURE and RAN RAGGED add color as well.

You might wonder why some short gluey words like ODA, ELENI, OTARU, ADITS, NOLI, and LAH appear in crosswords. They are undesirable to see in modern crosswords, but they're also so useful in building a grid. Note 1.) all the common letters and 2.) the alternating consonant vowel patterns — both of these qualities make it so tempting to use these types of entries in assembling a grid. I wouldn't have minded a little less good long fill in order to cut out some of these gluey bits.

A fun solve, and my defeat of the two themers which put up a struggle was satisfying.