How to Learn to Solve Crosswords
For some reason, many people believe that the ability to solve crossword puzzles is a talent that has been handed out to a select few from birth. This is far from the truth. Crosswords are not a constant test of your vocabulary or intelligence – they are a learning skill that anyone can develop.
No other word game or puzzle requires as much attention from your brain as a crossword puzzle. Experienced puzzles take into account not only the literal meaning of each clue, but similar ones they’ve seen before, frequently repeated answers, syntactic features, puns, cultural references, and of course the puzzle theme. Unfortunately, this means that crosswords can be downright frustrating for beginners. Everyone starts somewhere, and no matter what your abilities look like now, here are four general strategies to help you get better.
Solve puzzles every day
The only way to learn how to do crosswords is to do a lot of them, and the best way to do this is to incorporate them into your daily routine. For me, this means solving a few puzzles from an old book of 365 crossword puzzles by Will Shortz every night before bed. My mom prints out Washington Post crosswords and puts them out at breakfast; Friends of mine who travel by bus or train are die-hard New York Times crossword aficionados.
New York Times puzzles are a drug for most people for one reason: they are easy to find and have a built-in difficulty score. Monday is the easiest, Saturday is the hardest, and the puzzles in between get harder day by day, so you can pick the ones that work best for you. However, the New York Times is far from the only publisher. The Washington Post , Los Angeles Times, and Merriam-Webster also publish American-style crosswords daily; if you don’t like cryptic crosswords, try The Guardian . Some organizations, such as Queer Qrosswords and Puzzles for Progress , will even send you original themed puzzles as a reward for donating to nonprofits. Just remember that each publication has its own style – mastering the complex clue formulation in the Saturday New York Times puzzle does not necessarily translate into form from the Post, and vice versa.
Use the app
If you really want to improve your crosswords, signing up for an app like this one from the New York Times is a great idea. As much as I love them, paper jigsaw puzzles just can’t match the handy features you get with the app. You can easily check your work or expand the answers letter by letter, instead of accidentally glancing at the entire solution. This demystifies the clues just enough to make them possible, which is exactly what you want. Plus, most apps time your work time, making it easy to track your progress. But in reality, the biggest advantage is affordability: carrying thousands of digital puzzles in your pocket makes it easy to solve many puzzles.
Know when and how to cheat
Fraud is a delicate topic among crossword enthusiasts, but it cannot be denied that it has its place . Crosswords should be fun, and banging my head against the same wall repeatedly, praying for a different result is not my fun. Besides, frustration is a bad teacher; Unless you have a serious urge to compete, stubbornly refusing to seek answers or test your work, you will get nowhere.
Obviously, you should be able to solve all the clues that you can solve without help, but you cannot get better without problems. A little strategic deception can help you solve even the most difficult puzzles. Apps make this very easy: just check or open the letters one at a time until you find a particularly nasty clue. This gives you enough information to (mostly) hack it yourself, which in turn increases the likelihood that the answer will remain in your memory.
Paper puzzles complicate strategic fraud a bit, but thanks to the Internet, not much. If you get stuck with a printed crossword, Google the entire clue in quotes. Building your search around the clue rather than, say, the number of letters you have to work with will help you figure out what the clue wanted from you. Over time, you will need less and less help solving puzzles that used to be a real obstacle.
Study Up
If you’re serious about doing crossword puzzles, the internet is full of like-minded people who would love to help. Rex Parker’s blog is a great place to start. He solves a New York Times puzzle every day, compares the difficulty to the other puzzles of that day of the week, and breaks down the key hint / answer pairs in a short message. Between posts and comments, you’ll get a better idea of the solution than if you were just looking for answers.
You can also specialize even further and brush up on your knowledge of crosswords – words that are often found in crosswords, but almost never in conversation. The New York Times has a quiz that tests your knowledge of crosswords, as well as a more general guide from Dictionary.com. Perhaps, as you’d expect, there is also an entire website dedicated to crossword puzzles , with a new word appearing every day and an extensive archive .
If a statistical approach suits you better, there are crossword puzzle databases. Data scientist Noah Veltman analyzed a set of New York Times crossword clues and answers from 1996–2012, then ranked them by crossword puzzle and by frequency . You can filter lists by minimum occurrences or word length and view detailed information about any given answer. Likewise, Xwordinfo.com will show you the most popular Times puzzle answers and hints by year or word length. Heck, you could really go out of your way and write some tutorials like this guy did , although it’s unclear if his approach is more effective than just doing a bunch of crossword puzzles.
This does not mean that you have to build a robot or memorize clues in order to solve crosswords more effectively; the best “training strategy” is the one that makes you happy. It doesn’t matter how many puzzles you solve or how quickly you solve them – just keep on working hard. If you can do this, you will never stop improving.