New York Times, Wednesday, March 15, 2017

I was surprised to learn that these are pretty much the longest words in the English language with their letters in alphabetical order (and no repeated letters). I left out BIOPSY, for obvious reasons, and GHOSTY seemed like it was missing an L.

I originally submitted this theme two years ago with ALPHABETIC ORDER as the 15 letter reveal across the middle. Will and Joel wrote back that they liked the theme but couldn't get over the fact that it should be ALPHABETICAL ORDER. I wrote to Joel asking if they would consider a 15x17 puzzle and he said sorry, no.

However, he must have spent some time thinking about this because he came up with the current layout of the revealer phrases and told me all I needed to do was work in the six theme entries. Thank you, Joel!

BIJOUX and CHINTZ are not friendly words to squeeze into a tight grid, so there is some glue but apparently NOT SO MUCH as to be a dealbreaker. Expanding the grid to 15x16 (necessitated by IS IN) helped some.

I wanted RUMI at 26-Down, a Persian poet that Googles incredibly well, but he did not survive the final edit — I can imagine that as an editor you have to think long and hard before you allow a short two-vowel word like that because once it gets in everyone's word list you will be seeing it often.

My favorite entry is BZZT-- when I was growing up in Wisconsin they used to have big electrical bug zappers in the city park to control the mosquitos in that area, so BZZT brings back childhood memories...

The shaded answers say it all: every answer to a starred clue is a word with its letters in alphabetical order. I've highlighted them below in blue to help them stand out.

I had a tough time figuring out the "quote," as STARRED ENTRY didn't make sense at first. Seeing as the grid entries themselves are not starred — it's their clues that are starred — I struggled mightily to figure out what word could follow STARRED at 25-Across. Semantic and perhaps trivial, but I sure got stuck.

Not a lot of bonuses in the grid, but that's to be expected with so many "themers" to work around. Check out how interlocked the grid is, shaded or blue answers (below) crisscrossing all over the grid. I did enjoy RIYADH, such an odd *ADH ending. And BZZT! = one of my favorite short entries in recent memory. (I used to watch a lot — A LOT — of "Family Feud.")

An interesting combination of quasi-quote puzzle and word trivia. I would have loved to see some longer examples, but these six were pretty decent.

Hmm, it wouldn't be hard to write a script to see if there are longer words (or better yet, phrases) that follow this principle of alphabetized letters. How cool would it be if there were some that were of 8+ letters!

(Over the holidays, I got a neat wooden word puzzle from my mother-in-law. She thought it would keep me busy, given that there were 26^3 possibilities but only one solution. The next morning, I amazed her with the answer. A little Python script helped. Don't tell her that.)