Analyzing…
Analysis
There are 19 rows and 15 columns, with 0 rebus squares, and 30 cheater squares (marked with “+” in the colorized grid below.)
The grid uses 22 of 26 letters, missing JQVZ.
It is asymmetric.
Average word length: 5.50, Scrabble score: 285, Scrabble average: 1.51.
Puzzle has 5 fill-in-the-blank clues and 3 cross-reference clues.
This puzzle has 3 unique answer words.
It has 0 words that debuted in this puzzle and
were later reused:
These words are unique to the Shortz Era but have appeared in pre-Shortz puzzles:
These 32 answer words are not legal Scrabble™ entries, which sometimes means they are interesting:
Day of week comparisons
Distribution of answer words by length
Letter distribution
| Scrabble Score: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 8 | 10 |
Thumbnails
Various thumbnail views are shown:
- Standard view shows the grid pattern most clearly
- Open Squares (those which don’t touch any block, even diagonally) are blue
- Vowel distribution
- Scrabble score uses the same color key as above
- Freshness view shows unique answers in red (see colorized grid below)
With answers
Puzzles that may be similar to this one
Crosswords that share the most words with this one (excluding Sundays):
Unusual or long words that appear elsewhere:
Identical grids
Other puzzles with the same block pattern as this one:
Topologically similar grids
Other crosswords with exactly 96 blocks, 68 words, 73 open squares, and an average word length of 5.50:
Colorized grid for Fri Sep 9, 2022
The next two sections attempt to show how fresh the grid entries are.
In this view, unusual answers are colored depending on how often they have appeared in other puzzles.
Unique answers are in red, red overwrites orange which overwrites yellow, etc.
Cheater squares are indicated with a + sign.
| Unique | 1 other | 2 others | 3 others | 4 others |
Freshness Factor
FF: 42.5 – 75.2 percentile, 44.3 Friday percentile
Freshness Factor is a calculation that compares the number of times words in this puzzle have appeared
in other Shortz Era puzzles.
Click here for an explanation.
The chart below shows how many times each word has been used across all NYT puzzles, old and modern including Variety.
