You’ll also find something new on Fridays: a themed puzzle, of light-to-moderate difficulty. Mondays through Thursdays, we’ll publish themeless puzzles that decrease in difficulty throughout the week, with a new beginner-friendly puzzle on Thursdays. You can now solve a new crossword every weekday, Monday through Friday, on our Web site or in our app.

So we hope this announcement triggers no moral panic: The New Yorker Crossword is expanding. The latest gaming craze, Wordle, came with an adorable origin story-evidence against the theory that puzzles lead to domestic strife-and served as a reminder that, once in a while, the Internet can give us something nice. If anything, word games have enjoyed a wave of newfound appreciation during the pandemic, serving up social-distancing-friendly entertainment and doses of cheer amid the Weltschmerz. Headlines in the Times blamed the new pastime for everything from eyestrain to divorce (“ CROSSWORD MANIA BREAKS UP HOMES”) a spread in the Evening Star warned against puzzle-induced insomnia and the Cincinnati Post even attributed a murder-suicide to a man “driven to madness by crossword puzzles.”Ī century later, crosswords rank low on most lists of national menaces. “It is a rite / Of finitude,” he wrote, “a picture in whose frame / Roc, oast, and Inca decompose at once / Into the ABCs of every day.” Even if you find that you have to look up a few words (oast: “a usually conical kiln used for drying hops, malt, or tobacco”), we hope that the ritual provides you with some pleasurable procrastination.When a vogue for crosswords first swept the nation, in the nineteen-twenties, certain pundits saw cause for alarm. The great Richard Wilbur, who died last fall, once published a poem in The New Yorker about doing a crossword-“a ghostly grille / Through which, as often, we begin to see / The confluence of the Oka and the Aare”-on a train. If you have any questions about how the puzzle works, you don’t need to mail us an envelope: just visit the F.A.Q. Five constructors will take turns crafting the puzzles they are crossword experts whose answers and clues exhibit the same qualities we aim for in all of our writing: wit, intelligence, a wide-ranging interest in the world, and a love of language. It’ll be weekly, just like the magazine: a new one every Monday morning. In that spirit, we’re launching another crossword, online this time, and in the American style. Most of our readers have e-mail addresses now, and the Web has given us the space to try new things-and to try old things again. The lucky few who already had e-mail addresses could request instructions electronically. Knowing that the form was unfamiliar to many of our readers, we also offered “ The New Yorker’s Guide to Solving Cryptic Crosswords,” two thousand words of explanation available to anyone who sent us a self-addressed stamped envelope or a fax number. Our cryptic had an unusual shape: we tucked it into a single column, a third of a page, in the magazine.

(What better way to procrastinate when facing a deadline?) We débutedĪ crossword puzzle once before, two decades back-a so-called cryptic crossword, a fiendishly difficult variation more commonly played in the U.K. But the linguistic pastime had proved remarkably persistent, the piece observed: “though they are not much talked about nowadays, they continue to have their millions of ardent addicts.”Ī fair number of those addicts have worked at The New Yorker. More than half a century ago, a Talk of the Town piece in this magazine confidently dated the height of “ the great crossword puzzle craze” to 1924.

Free crossword puzzles new yorker