MEDIUM PUZZLES
The Tuesday crossword isn’t much harder than the Monday puzzle, but the difficulty level ratchets up a bit on Wednesday heading into Thursday. The vocabulary is often the same sort you see in early- week puzzles, but the clues tend to be trickier, with less reliance on straightforward definitions.
A word like DART typically has specific, factual clues at the beginning of the week— [Pub projectile], [Bull’s-eye hitter]—but in a Wednesday or Thursday puzzle, you’ll have to think more flexibly to decipher such clues as [It has feathers and flies] or [What shifty eyes do].
The themes are a little tougher to figure out in medium-difficulty crosswords. Themes involving puns or gimmicks that produce phrases that don’t exist “in the language” become more common on Wednesday. For example, one Wednesday theme included SHOOTING RATS and THE LAST WARTS, which make little sense until you understand how the theme works—the last word in a base phrase is reversed.
Raise your index of suspicion for wordplay, twists and alternate meanings. As puzzles become more difficult, multiword phrases crop up more often, and the clues are less likely to hint that it’s a phrase. For example, let’s say the clue is a single word like [Amasses]; while it’s tempting to put an S in the last square, it might well be the two-word phrase RACKS UR Words like “put” and “set” can be in the past or present tense, so you want to be careful not to automatically enter an -ED at the end.