My approach to this 50-word puzzle departed radically from my approach to the 52-word puzzle (see 6/1/2012 notes); The seeds here were three ING fragments which are contained in HEARING DOGS, SHARING A BED and HANGING AROUND. The notion was this: I would have over 2000 choices for each ????ING???? and ????ING?????? — and that sort of flexibility would probably offer multiple fills for one or more quadrant.
So, I loaded my word list with items of those patterns using OneLook and a dictionary of phrasal verbs. It felt like I added thousands to my word list, and it certainly paid off in the end.
This puzzle breaks the NYT record for the lowest word count. The previous record set in 2005 by Frank Longo used only 38 blocks.
1 C | 2 H | 3 A | 4 P | 5 P | 6 R | 7 I | 8 M | |||||||
9 V | O | I | C | E | 10 D | 11 S | E | E | G | E | 12 R |
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13 L | E | T | T | E | R | 14 C | 15 S | T | E | A | N | N | E |
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16 O | U | T | S | K | I | P | 17 H | U | R | L | I | N | G |
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18 G | R | I | M | I | E | R | 19 A | D | S | I | T | E | S |
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20 S | T | A | N | D | T | 21 O | R | E | A | S | O | N | ||
22 E | D | G | A | R | W | I | N | T | E | R | ||||
23 P | A | I | N | T | ||||||||||
24 H | 25 E | 26 A | R | I | N | G | D | 27 O | 28 G | 29 S | ||||
30 H | A | N | G | I | N | G | A | R | O | U | N | 31 D | ||
32 L | A | T | T | I | C | E | 33 B | I | L | L | E | R | 34 S |
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35 E | V | E | R | T | O | R | 36 E | V | I | L | E | Y | E |
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37 N | O | S | E | A | T | S | 38 D | E | T | E | R | G | E |
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39 O | C | T | E | T | S | 40 R | E | T | E | A | M |
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41 S | O | S | O | 42 S | S | R | S |
Answer summary:
11 unique to this puzzle, 3 debuted here and reused later, 4 unique to Modern Era but used previously.
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