Lesson 2: How to Spot Your Mistakes
Many crossword clues can lead to more than one answer, and solvers can easily choose an incorrect one. If something seems right but you can’t get anything else to fit around it in that section of the grid, consider erasing it and working from the crossing entries instead.
If you’ve written something in but it makes no sense to you or is a phrase you’ve never encountered, be very suspicious. Especially in an early- to mid-week puzzle, there should be very few words that are unfamiliar to the average New York Times reader. So trust your instincts! However, that doesn’t mean a clue won’t fall into an individual solver’s blind spot—certain proper names (from sports, pop culture, opera, etc.), specialized or technical terms and idiomatic phrases might be unfamiliar to a segment of the solving audience.
If an entry is completely unknown to you, try changing the word breaks, check all the crossings, and make sure you’re confident that all the letters are correct. In one recent Saturday Times crossword, a 4-letter word meaning [Swells] crossed a 15-letter phrase clued as [Shark’s activity]. Some solvers guessed that the answer to [Swells] was TOPS rather than FOPS, which yielded the nonsensical PULLING AT A STONE instead of the correct PULLING A FAST ONE. In this instance, typing “pulling at a stone” into a search engine would tell you that it’s not a regional idiom, thus suggesting that there’s got to be an error some where in that entry. In other cases, of course, a crossword includes an idiom that you just haven’t heard before; asking a friend or checking a search engine can help you to confirm that the answer’s correct.
If a shorter word is the source of trouble, check a dictionary (printed or online) to confirm the spelling. Be wary of relying on a Web search to “prove” how a word’s spelled; the Internet’s full of misspellings that can lead crossword solvers astray. Established dictionary sites, such as Merriam-Webster’s www.m-w.com, the reference compilation www.bartleby.com or the dictionary bank www.onelook.com, are more reliable than a page of Google results.