New York Times, Tuesday, September 6, 2022

A while back, I had the idea to build a puzzle around a few theme answers including an ellipsis (like WHAT THE… and …OR ELSE), with the ellipsis taking up three spaces. Words with the "iji" sequence would be directly below the ellipsis so that the dots would become the ellipsis. Like some of my more complicated ideas, this idea never came to fruition; the fact that I felt like I would also have to avoid extraneous i's and j's deterred me from ever even starting on a grid. Sometime later, I had the idea for this much simpler version of the theme. I guess sometimes less is more (and I bet there are some solvers out there who would agree).

I enjoy working with stacks of 7-letter answers, so it was nice to get the opportunity to do so here. I think this grid turned out quite well, and I was also glad to see my clue for ELOPING make the cut. Happy solving!

Such a tittle-ating theme!

I write in ALLCAPS, so it took me a beat or three to figure out how DOT DOT DOT worked. It's neat that there are any words, period, that contain the *iji* string of letters. (You can search for these by entering *IJI* into our Finder.)

A shame that there aren't any phrases where the three letters break across words of a phrase, though. Will Shortz is usually a stickler about this, saying for instance that the DOLLAR part of FIJI DOLLAR doesn't do any thematic work.

BEIJING violates another of Will's tenets, that themes typically ought to be built around multi-word phrases, which tend to be more colorful than single-worders.

I wondered — are there any entries that contain sequences like JII or JJJ? Entering *[IJ][IJ][IJ]* into our Finder, unfortunately, shows mostly boring alternatives that involve III.

I triple sigh.

It's always useful to weave in bonuses to enhance the solving experience, and when some solvers may miss the theme completely, this verges on essential. It's a tough task, though, when your central entry forces four big corners, heavy with 7-letter entries.

Thankfully, Trenton is a master at 7s! Zingers like DON JUAN, O CANADA, TEMP JOB will hardly leave people IN AGONY. One of the keys is to use black squares to make those corners 7x3 instead of 7x4. Another is to make sure that only one themer is running through each corner, so you have a ton of flexibility. After that, it's a matter of time-consuming optimization.

I didn't find this to be the most capital of ideas since none of the findings were wowzers. I did enjoy connecting the DOT DOT DOTs, though. Such an interesting trigram of letters to build around.

Constructors, let's see if we can improve Jeff's search results by learning more about the Finder. The IJI pattern is tough, so we might not get anything useful, but maybe we'll learn some useful techniques.

• Jeff already did the basic search for *IJI* but it's often a good idea to try that same pattern with the OneLook button since it uses a different database. Any chance you could use Shijiazhuang or Kharijites? Probably not, but worth trying.

Jeff wants answers with some combination of three I and J letters, but not the boring III. For that, we need RegEx. Let's break it down.

• Letters in square brackets means use any of them, so [IJ] finds any words with either an I or a J. Nearly half a million results, but it's a start.
• Numbers in curly brackets means repeat that the specified number of times, so [IJ]{3} finds words with three letters in a row that are either I or J. It's the equivalent of Jeff's *[IJ][IJ][IJ]* and it has the same problem — those boring III words we'd like to exclude.
• Exclusion requires something called a negative lookahead that we haven't talked about before. Put what you don't want to see between (?! and ). Using that, our final query is (?!III)[IJ]{3}.