David C. Duncan Dekker author page

Interesting assortment of letterplay examples. I appreciated that Tina presented pairs, one entry helping me solve the other. As I solved, they felt scattered all over the grid but placed neatly. We've highlighted them below to help them shine.

Letter count themes have been done many times over the years, but I couldn't find any of these specific ones used before. FIVE-O highlights the five Os in VOODOO DOLL, TWO AM points to the two AMs in SAM ADAMS, etc.

This type of theme tends to be too straightforward, so I loved the needle-scratch of ZERO-G. Thousands of entries have zero Gs, so using a random example would have been Super-G boring. OINOINON is anything but that! I'm not a huge baseball guy, but when I finally pieced together the common call, GOING, GOING, GONE, I led the crowd in a wave. Geez, the Gs have left the building! Such a neat zag after so many predictable zigs.

I didn't love that the themers were a mix of initialisms (AT AN ANGLE = TRIPLE A) and letter counts (HUSH HUSH = FOUR H). UNIQUE USER is a strange crossover, too — shouldn't the second U in UNIQUE count? (Thanks to reader John Shillington for pointing this out!)

Some of them felt too easy to achieve, too — for example, there are hundreds of TWO AM phrases that would work just as well as SAM ADAMS. Even FIVE O isn't difficult.

I'm sure my haters will say OH BOO HOO, that YOU'RE OUT OF YOUR GOURD. However, I'm much more impressed when themers feel a touch magical; like not everyone with access to a database search tool could turn them up.

All in all, a nice smorgasbord of letter play, and I'll certainly remember that ZERO-G zinger at the end.

Check out all those rare letters! JQXZ are the Big Four in crosswords, letters that can be tough to incorporate into a grid. Dave packs in an amazing quantity — hit the "Analyze" button at the bottom of this screen to see the letter distribution. Twelve of these Big Fours is cool to see.

I particularly liked the ZZ/ZZ pileup near the middle. Something so fun about the mash.

"Stunt puzzles" often don't resonate with me, since they tend to sacrifice so much to pull things off. So it was a pleasure to uncover a decent amount of great fill in this themeless, ALAKAZAM, QUIZ BOWL, along with DEMO TAPE, SWIM MEET. Not as much as I usually like to see in a themeless, but still enough to make all those Big Four letters feel worth it.

There were a few hiccups. AFFAIRE looks so odd with that ending E. ENQUIRY is an odd spelling. IMPEND feels weird compared to the more common IMPENDING usage. (TWOPENCE, which I thought was arbitrary, is apparently a synonym for "a trivial sum" — who knew?) And a handful of SHU, BSC (bachelor of science … and computing? Apparently it's another form of BS.), CAPT.

But all in all, I enjoyed what those 12 Big Four letters brought to the puzzle. Especially impressive how many Dave worked into the center of the puzzle. Very cool to sit back and study such a high concentration of rare letters into such a small area.

At XWord Info, we track a ton of records. Note that Dave's name appears three times on the pangram records list now … every one of his three NYT puzzles!

It was only a matter of time until the old record — two people with quadruple pangrams — got smashed. QUINTUPLE instances of each letter today.

I'd say roughly 1/4 of solvers/constructors tell me they love pangrams; something so cool about that full set of high-value Scrabbly letters. Another 1/2 seem to hate them with a burning passion, citing the trade-offs in gluey fill — and gritty solving experience — that they often necessitate. (The remaining 1/4 seem neutral.) I imagine today's offering will generate a lot of strong feelings, one way or the other.

I appreciate a pangram, as long as the trade-offs aren't that noticeable. Today's was amazingly smooth, given the astonishing FIVEFOLD full sets of letters. I especially liked the line of Qs across the middle, with such silky results. Okay, there's a SQFT holding the top of that section together, but that's minor. And as a lover of all things physics, I loved DOWN QUARK.

And the raft of Zs and Js in the north! ACID JAZZ is a great entry, and Dave builds around it with RAZZ, CRAZE, BAJA. RAKI was tough for me to figure out, but no doubt it's a real type of liquor.

Surprisingly, there was only one region that made me pause: the lower right. JIVER felt like a compromise in order to work in that fifth J — although it does have dictionary support, it feels contrived and/or old-timey to me — and then DXIX felt like a last-ditch attempt to shoehorn in the last two Xs. I had the same qualm about one of the quadruple pangrams, as using random Roman numerals feels like a pretty iffy method of working in extra Xs.

But overall, the puzzle was remarkably smooth — surprisingly, more so than some of the previous record holders. Whether you love or hate pangrams, whether you love or hate people breaking records for the sake of breaking records, this is undoubtedly a meticulous feat of construction.

I normally don't care for records in crosswords, as they're too often something that constructors prize but solvers completely miss — except for the gluey globs of fill that these record-breakers often force. Sometimes I even wonder if it's a bad thing that we keep records of such things as average Scrabble score, as it might promote this type of "do it for the record's sake" type of behavior, which too often does disservice to the solver.

But today's is a record-breaking type that gave me huge enjoyment. David gets high on the leader board, giving us so many of the "Big Four," J Q X Z. All of these letters can be rough to integrate into a puzzle without causing compromises in smoothness, so it's amazing that David worked in three of each with only minor blights.

Not only that, but there are three of EVERY letter in the puzzle — a triple pangram!

Sure, I didn't love TESTEES (although it's technically a word). There are a few other entries that might raise an eyebrow, but I decided I liked them all:

QUIFF. Never heard of this before, but it's an easily recognizable hairstyle that was "in" back a few decades ago. Cool word!

QUIRE. Not in my knowledge base, but it's legit.

The SHARIF / QUIFF crossing. Okay, this one caused me fits, as I assumed SHARIF would be clued to the great Omar SHARIF, who recently passed. Serves me right for overthinking things, that maybe SHARIA and QUIFA might be better than SHARIF and QUIFF. Tough crossing, and I can see the argument for it being unfair, given the cluing.

There's not a lot of multi-word goodness, with just JUST A BIT, MASON JAR, LEGO SET, and MAE WEST standing out, but there's so much Scrabbliness that it won me over. Plus, SLACKER and BANDSAW are pretty nice one-word entries.

All in all, a memorable puzzle. I usually cringe a bit when I sniff a constructor trying to break a record, but this final product was smooth enough that I really enjoyed the stunt.

Neat little mini-theme, FROM A TO Z echoed below by PANGRAMS. Not surprisingly, the puzzle itself is a pangram! I enjoyed trying to figure out where the J, Q, X, and Z might pop up. I was really glad to have the mini-theme in mind as I AGONIZED over what the heck a PEZIZA might be. Very helpful to have the pangram idea in mind as I struggled over that crazy-looking PE?IZA string!

It's rarely effortless to complete a pangram in a themeless puzzle, even using the maximum allowed number of words (72). It's usually a cinch to toss in one or two of the JQXZ letters, and sometimes getting three of them in isn't too bad. Working all of them in often results in compromises — not surprising to see the gluey ODA near the sole Q.

Other than that though, I was impressed that the puzzle only had a few undesirable bits, and those were quite minor. Even more impressive was the sheer number of JQXZ instances — 10 is no joke. Not a huge amount of fantastic fill, but it's a real treat to get so many of those rare letters.

Confused why [Hook on a kite] would describe TALON? Think about "kite" as the type of bird, not as the recreational toy.

Finally, beautiful clue for LARYNX, which made me think of a speaking part as in a movie role. Perfect use of language to confound and delight.