New York Times, Thursday, October 9, 2014

When I was filling this puzzle, I thought a lot about whether to include 26D, ETYMON. On the one hand, I always strive for familiar vocabulary in my puzzles, words and phrases you'd be likely to encounter in your everyday life. That's probably not the case with the word ETYMON.

On the other hand, I think it's okay and even commendable to have difficult vocabulary in a late-week puzzle. Thursday-Saturday crosswords are supposed to be challenging, and I don't think all of the difficulty has to come only from the clues. Not all difficult vocabulary is fun to solve, of course — I find proper names I've never heard of to be annoying to suss out, because they're not inferable and I don't get any sort of "aha" at the end. With something like ETYMON, it at least looks like a word that would mean "Word origin," so even if most solvers don't get it at first they won't be left feeling confused when they get the answer.

As far as I can remember this is the fourth "uniclue"-type crossword I've run in the Times. That's one in which all the clues (in the print edition anyway) appear in a single list, combining Across and Down. When two answers share a number, they also share a clue. The previous three times I did this are listed on XWord Info's latest summary page. The theme of Joel's puzzle today is similar to John's, but with 10 examples rather than seven, and some of them intersecting. Very elegant.

Uniclue! It's been quite a while since we've seen one of these — surprising how rare this type of theme is. When Will asked us to assemble a list for this theme type, I would have set the over/under at 7.5, maybe 8.5 — good thing I'm not a Vegas bookie. Seems like a lot of potential in this theme category, given how few have been done. I think it's really neat to break a very big convention; compressing two sets of clues into one.

I enjoyed getting ten full themers today. Since each one fixes both an across and a down entry, I'd guess more than about six instances would be pushing it. In fact, Joel could have gotten away with only eight. Note the "cheater square" to the left of CAPE? Typically cheaters make a grid easier to fill, but this is a rare case in which it makes things much more difficult. It means that Joel had to find two separate theme pairs which crossed each other at two points. The result is impressively smooth.

A similar case in the center of the grid — if Joel had taken that black square to the left of FEEL and instead put black squares where the two T's are, it would have made filling much easier. So again, to only have an OEDS as a very minor issue is impressive.

Given that the first Shortz-era uniclue puzzle had a similar theme concept, it would have been nice to have an additional layer somehow, perhaps if all the double-use letters had spelled something? Or if they had all been the same letter? Or a number, like "1"? A lot of potential there, so I'm sure Will will now get more unicule-type submissions. I'm hopeful that if he does, they all take it to another level of complexity, pushing the boundaries.

We've seen the usual two columns of clues for regular puzzles, one for uniclues, and even three (for ones with diagonal entries). I'm curious to see if FOUR columns of clues or ZERO comes first. Not quite sure how either would work, but it's a lot of fun to think about.