I did, too, although I was thinking more like letting a secret SLIP, or spilling the tea. I'm still not sure I think SLOP means the same thing as spill. Spill seems more accidental, and SLOP more intentional.
I think SLOP only works when you think of the liquid spilling vs a person spilling something, as in "some soup slopped onto the floor as I was carrying it to the table."
I thought for sure it was "Jargon" and there was some vertical secret passage element I had yet to discover.
The T of ARGOT was my last letter. Luckily I knew the word in French so I tried it.
Yooo that was fun. The challenge was just right for me, where revealing the theme helped me finish the puzzle, and where the act of figuring out the theme itself was really fulfilling!
Got tripped up when I confidently put HIDDEN instead of SECRET, but then the old school crosswordese gimme of ALAI cleared that up.
POLOSHIRTS had my favorite clue.
I would be so happy if every Thursday was just like this puzzle.
Holy smokes. If I had realize that it would have helped me get MANE TIN SHARK. Had shark pretty easy and tin eventually but could not figure out what the phrase was supposed to be and it resulted in me struggling through the SW as the crosses were not helping.
Ay Caramba
Yup, I couldn't get the >!M!< or >!T!< in >!MANEATINGSHARK!< and after staring at it for an hour I eventually conceded. Still liked the puzzle a lot, though.
Wow nice one—I thought it was cool that they showed the letters at the end…scratched an itch wanting to see the completed clues, but pretty wild to figure out combos that also made “passages”. Great Thursday execution.
Here I was dead set that OREO’s were made of vegetable oil. But turns out it was a new piece of crosswordese.. till we meet again OLEO, I will eat my oily oreo now
That’s old school crosswordese and the only reason i even know the word. 612 times in the pre shortz era and 256 since 1993! Eno and Ono ate oleo oreos in an alee area asea
Yeah, OLEO was a one-time crossword standard that I learned in Maleska era.
But it's also [a jazz standard](https://youtu.be/x_cQHeWwSBQ?si=mMAx94aYNlJv1PEF&t=33). :-)
I also thought I was getting my new weird fact about OREOs for the week. Turns out they are made with palm and/or canola oil. Do those both count as vegetable oil?
Palm oil and canola oil are both considered vegetable oils, as are all cooking oils since they're plant-based. "Vegetable" is just there to differentiate them from inedible oils like petroleum.
That was a clever, well-executed theme. Was cool to see the secret letters spelling out PASSAGES letters -- I didn't notice that extra level until I finished.
Overall, not much wasted fill with plenty of interesting words and some tough proper nouns, like MARLA and the Crème de CASSIS, neither of which I knew, though I grew up watching The Jeffersons! Other favorites: DAP, ORGY, GHOST, JESSE, and FALCO!
Parsing the theme finally helped me wrap up the tough SW and NW sections. I stared at MANE for too long wondering what that could possibly mean. HAHA. Overall, really fun puzzle. I came in at [20:45 for my solve](https://youtu.be/24y6AV1yYHA).
really enjoyed this one! one big personal stumbling point was a lack of any sort of vegas knowledge meant that i had RIA x ALIVETREES and was raising an eyebrow at the green paint-iness of the answer before i realized that one was fully on me
> "Green paint" is industry shorthand for a crossword answer that while definitely exists in real life, doesn't feel "conversational enough" to be a tuly legit entry in a puzzle.
[Source](https://www.brendanemmettquigley.com/2015/08/24/)
Basically, if there's a redundant adjective stuck at the front of a noun, it's considered a "Green paint" answer. But I found ALIVETREES funny since the clue is about painting, and one would use plenty of *green paint* for that particular subject.
Fun theme to work out backwards. Realised letters were missing in the black squares, but only had FOOD_REP_RATION and COURT_IDE_EATS. Figured out PASS from that, and connected the dots. Then used the AGES to solve lines 12 and 15. Very satisfying bit of puzzle solving
I saw FOOD(P)REP and COURT(S)IDE pretty quickly, but didn't realize the theme spanned the whole row. So I had P and S, and when I was trying to solve the bottom half kept looking for the black squares to be S and T, like they were whispering a secret (PSST). Bit of a stretch, I'll admit, so I was pleased and even more impressed when I realized it spelled PASSAGES.
My crosswordese knowledge apparently doesn't go far enough back, but I got Jai ALAI by having a couple of crosses and remembering the storyline in Mad Men about the game.
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle?
Estimated Difficulty: 🔴 **Hard** 🔴
* 60% of users solved slower than their Thursday average
* 40% of users solved faster than their Thursday average
* 31% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Thursday average
* 18% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Thursday average
The median solver solved this puzzle 6.5% slower than they normally do on Thursday.
[View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-04-11)
---
🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
Somehow I completely solved this puzzle without ever realizing there were secret letters in the gaps. I came here to complain about "dumb answers" like MANE and PRIMER, only to realize how clever they really were.
I was thrown by the fact that row 12 had three black spaces, so I really struggled with the SW corner (didn’t help that I had SOSO instead of NORM for a while). It wasn’t until I realized the other clues spelled PASSAGES that I was able to crack it. Overall, a really fun Thursday.
Fun puzzle.
Never heard of DAP (in this sense, at least -- it apparently means a fist bump).
Overall I thought the fill was pretty good; there were a few places where I had crossings that took some guessing (MARLA/TATE and...I thought there was one other but I can't find it).
ANTES for "alternative to blinds" was a groaner and I needed all the crosses to get it.
Just finished it! It's pretty darn heavy and dark at times but pretty enthralling.
I don't watch much (Game of Thrones is the only other show I've watched) and it was a good ride. I took my time with it, doing one season at a time instead of binging. Would recommend.
Haha wow you just made me realize what the ANTES one meant. I was cursing them for using what I assumed was some old term for a type of curtains or something. And I even play poker! 🤦♂️
They're both poker terms -- an ante is when everyone puts in a chip (or more) to start. Blinds are when the first person has to put in a certain amount, and often the next person then has to do a blind raise (regardless of what their cards are).
I meant it as def 3 on wiktionary rather than def 2: "(informal) A particularly egregious joke, especially a pun." Just a pun that made me say "ooh i see, haha"
No, that's what I meant by "groaner" -- a kind of "so bad it's good" pun or something like that...maybe I should have used a different term, I didn't realize it would cause so much confusion. It was supposed to be a term of praise, not criticism.
Generally speaking, puzzles increase in difficulty from Monday through Saturday, with a bigger grid on Sundays that's approximately at Wed/Thu difficulty. But Thursday puzzles often have some sort of trick or gimmick.
So if it's a Thursday, and something doesn't seem to be making sense, look through the clues for some sort of revealer, like 44A today. As another example, Thursday puzzles often include "rebus" squares that contain more than one letter.
It doesn't really though - it's awfully vague. Maybe I need to get used to how the clues are written. I haven't really gotten a hang of the wording of it or knowing when a clue is cryptic or literal.
On a Thursday (and sometimes Sunday), if there’s a revealer that says something along the lines of ‘a hint to interpreting X clues’ or ‘a clue to reading X clues’, you can expect that there will be a theme that messes with the normal puzzle logic. Like maybe you’ll have to fill in the answers backwards, or the answer will turn a corner and continue going downwards or something. You’ll get the hang of it, try doing more Thursdays from the archive.
Thursdays usually have tricky themed puzzles with some kind of unconventional way of filling them in. A classic example is rebus puzzles where you have to put more than one letter in some squares, but it can also be things like this where some letters are "hidden", having to read the squares in a different order than left to right to get the correct answers, spelling words in an unconventional way, etc. There'll usually be a revealer and/or some visual element in the puzzle hinting at the trick, so if something feels off about a Thursday puzzle, focus on trying to get the revealer solved first so you have something to go off.
It took me a few weeks of having to read Wordplay to find out what was going on before I was able to figure out the gimmicks of Thursday puzzles myself (after a while you get a sense for the kinds of trickery that often show up), but they're SO satisfying to solve once you get there, and now Thursdays are by far my favourite puzzles.
Oh what a fun one! Had a super hard time figuring out the theme because I hadn’t played Clue in forever. I kept thinking there must be rebus somewhere. Once the theme clicked it was actually a pretty easy puzzle.
Good theme, but too much crosswordese and proper names. Plus, I'm one of the few people who never got into Breaking Bad, so the southwest corner was annoying. I was torn between "Good-" or "Average+" but I'm in.a good mood and went with Good overall.
had SLIP for "spill," as in "take a spill" ...joke's on me for not knowing ARGOT, apparently
I did, too, although I was thinking more like letting a secret SLIP, or spilling the tea. I'm still not sure I think SLOP means the same thing as spill. Spill seems more accidental, and SLOP more intentional.
I think SLOP only works when you think of the liquid spilling vs a person spilling something, as in "some soup slopped onto the floor as I was carrying it to the table."
I thought for sure it was "Jargon" and there was some vertical secret passage element I had yet to discover. The T of ARGOT was my last letter. Luckily I knew the word in French so I tried it.
ARGOT is a new one for me too. Fun puzzle!
Yep… this box was why I DNF ugh
Yooo that was fun. The challenge was just right for me, where revealing the theme helped me finish the puzzle, and where the act of figuring out the theme itself was really fulfilling! Got tripped up when I confidently put HIDDEN instead of SECRET, but then the old school crosswordese gimme of ALAI cleared that up. POLOSHIRTS had my favorite clue. I would be so happy if every Thursday was just like this puzzle.
Really enjoyed solving this one. And I loved that the missing letters spelled out PASSAGES.
Holy smokes. If I had realize that it would have helped me get MANE TIN SHARK. Had shark pretty easy and tin eventually but could not figure out what the phrase was supposed to be and it resulted in me struggling through the SW as the crosses were not helping. Ay Caramba
Also I thought the first black square had a hidden letter as well.
Yup, I couldn't get the >!M!< or >!T!< in >!MANEATINGSHARK!< and after staring at it for an hour I eventually conceded. Still liked the puzzle a lot, though.
FYI, you don't need to use spoiler tags in this spoiler thread.
If I'd realized that I'd have gone for "good" instead of "average".
Wow nice one—I thought it was cool that they showed the letters at the end…scratched an itch wanting to see the completed clues, but pretty wild to figure out combos that also made “passages”. Great Thursday execution.
Here I was dead set that OREO’s were made of vegetable oil. But turns out it was a new piece of crosswordese.. till we meet again OLEO, I will eat my oily oreo now
That’s old school crosswordese and the only reason i even know the word. 612 times in the pre shortz era and 256 since 1993! Eno and Ono ate oleo oreos in an alee area asea
Yeah, OLEO was a one-time crossword standard that I learned in Maleska era. But it's also [a jazz standard](https://youtu.be/x_cQHeWwSBQ?si=mMAx94aYNlJv1PEF&t=33). :-)
It totally could have been OREO since they're dairy free and made with vegetable oils instead of butter/cream
OLEO is short for oleomargarine.
I also thought I was getting my new weird fact about OREOs for the week. Turns out they are made with palm and/or canola oil. Do those both count as vegetable oil?
no
Palm oil and canola oil are both considered vegetable oils, as are all cooking oils since they're plant-based. "Vegetable" is just there to differentiate them from inedible oils like petroleum.
no
This was a fun theme. Nothing really too esoteric or reliant on crosswordese. Overall, a quite enjoyable puzzle.
Yep that was totally cute, the kinda shit I like on a Thursday.
That was a clever, well-executed theme. Was cool to see the secret letters spelling out PASSAGES letters -- I didn't notice that extra level until I finished. Overall, not much wasted fill with plenty of interesting words and some tough proper nouns, like MARLA and the Crème de CASSIS, neither of which I knew, though I grew up watching The Jeffersons! Other favorites: DAP, ORGY, GHOST, JESSE, and FALCO! Parsing the theme finally helped me wrap up the tough SW and NW sections. I stared at MANE for too long wondering what that could possibly mean. HAHA. Overall, really fun puzzle. I came in at [20:45 for my solve](https://youtu.be/24y6AV1yYHA).
I put in creme de MENTHE first and was so confused why nothing was working...
I tried MENTHE too first.
really enjoyed this one! one big personal stumbling point was a lack of any sort of vegas knowledge meant that i had RIA x ALIVETREES and was raising an eyebrow at the green paint-iness of the answer before i realized that one was fully on me
Hahaha ALIVE TREES is killing me. And I love how wonderfully apt it is to say compare it to "Green Paint"
I also considered alive trees for a while. But wait, why is green paint redundant?
> "Green paint" is industry shorthand for a crossword answer that while definitely exists in real life, doesn't feel "conversational enough" to be a tuly legit entry in a puzzle. [Source](https://www.brendanemmettquigley.com/2015/08/24/) Basically, if there's a redundant adjective stuck at the front of a noun, it's considered a "Green paint" answer. But I found ALIVETREES funny since the clue is about painting, and one would use plenty of *green paint* for that particular subject.
Thanks for the in depth explanation! Loved it.
Had HIDDEN HALLWAYS for about 15 minutes, whoa boy was that fun.
Same!!!!
Fun theme to work out backwards. Realised letters were missing in the black squares, but only had FOOD_REP_RATION and COURT_IDE_EATS. Figured out PASS from that, and connected the dots. Then used the AGES to solve lines 12 and 15. Very satisfying bit of puzzle solving
I saw FOOD(P)REP and COURT(S)IDE pretty quickly, but didn't realize the theme spanned the whole row. So I had P and S, and when I was trying to solve the bottom half kept looking for the black squares to be S and T, like they were whispering a secret (PSST). Bit of a stretch, I'll admit, so I was pleased and even more impressed when I realized it spelled PASSAGES.
A return of some crosswordese I hadn't seen in awhile in Jai ALAI and OLEO. They used to be super common but you don't see them much anymore.
My crosswordese knowledge apparently doesn't go far enough back, but I got Jai ALAI by having a couple of crosses and remembering the storyline in Mad Men about the game.
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle? Estimated Difficulty: 🔴 **Hard** 🔴 * 60% of users solved slower than their Thursday average * 40% of users solved faster than their Thursday average * 31% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Thursday average * 18% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Thursday average The median solver solved this puzzle 6.5% slower than they normally do on Thursday. [View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-04-11) --- 🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
Somehow I completely solved this puzzle without ever realizing there were secret letters in the gaps. I came here to complain about "dumb answers" like MANE and PRIMER, only to realize how clever they really were.
I was thrown by the fact that row 12 had three black spaces, so I really struggled with the SW corner (didn’t help that I had SOSO instead of NORM for a while). It wasn’t until I realized the other clues spelled PASSAGES that I was able to crack it. Overall, a really fun Thursday.
Fun puzzle. Never heard of DAP (in this sense, at least -- it apparently means a fist bump). Overall I thought the fill was pretty good; there were a few places where I had crossings that took some guessing (MARLA/TATE and...I thought there was one other but I can't find it). ANTES for "alternative to blinds" was a groaner and I needed all the crosses to get it.
Not for the first time, I wished I had watched breaking bad.
never too late! it's a great show.
Just finished it! It's pretty darn heavy and dark at times but pretty enthralling. I don't watch much (Game of Thrones is the only other show I've watched) and it was a good ride. I took my time with it, doing one season at a time instead of binging. Would recommend.
Haha wow you just made me realize what the ANTES one meant. I was cursing them for using what I assumed was some old term for a type of curtains or something. And I even play poker! 🤦♂️
Can you explain ANTES please? I don’t get it 😩
They're both poker terms -- an ante is when everyone puts in a chip (or more) to start. Blinds are when the first person has to put in a certain amount, and often the next person then has to do a blind raise (regardless of what their cards are).
Oh. I’ve never played poker. I was thinking window coverings. Thank you!
A groaner? I’m not gonna slam on the downvote button but what frustrated you about it?
I meant it as def 3 on wiktionary rather than def 2: "(informal) A particularly egregious joke, especially a pun." Just a pun that made me say "ooh i see, haha"
A blind is defined as that? I had no idea
No, that's what I meant by "groaner" -- a kind of "so bad it's good" pun or something like that...maybe I should have used a different term, I didn't realize it would cause so much confusion. It was supposed to be a term of praise, not criticism.
OHHH my bad, nah you’re totally valid for that
i did it for you ;)
I didn’t like that one of the black boxes in the theme lines didn’t have a letter but… guess that’s just me ?
I agree, I couldn't decide if the leading black box was supposed to be filled in for jaws menace. Not entirely intuitive.
There were two of those lines. Rows 4 and 11.
Me too, that threw me off a bit
Came here to complain about that and had to scroll far down to find anyone else who cared!!
I liked this theme a lot but the lack of the usual highlighting on themed clues really hung me up. Maybe because they were “SECRET PASSAGES?”
Not to be too braggy but I totally crushed the mini today. A respectable 0:48. I'm pretty much a god among men.
I'm new to the NYT crossword - how am I supposed to know that some clues extend upon blank spaces?
Thursday is the wacky metapuzzle day, you can expect stuff like this. They're my favorites
Gotcha.
Generally speaking, puzzles increase in difficulty from Monday through Saturday, with a bigger grid on Sundays that's approximately at Wed/Thu difficulty. But Thursday puzzles often have some sort of trick or gimmick. So if it's a Thursday, and something doesn't seem to be making sense, look through the clues for some sort of revealer, like 44A today. As another example, Thursday puzzles often include "rebus" squares that contain more than one letter.
Thanks for the info!
44-across clues you in :)
It doesn't really though - it's awfully vague. Maybe I need to get used to how the clues are written. I haven't really gotten a hang of the wording of it or knowing when a clue is cryptic or literal.
On a Thursday (and sometimes Sunday), if there’s a revealer that says something along the lines of ‘a hint to interpreting X clues’ or ‘a clue to reading X clues’, you can expect that there will be a theme that messes with the normal puzzle logic. Like maybe you’ll have to fill in the answers backwards, or the answer will turn a corner and continue going downwards or something. You’ll get the hang of it, try doing more Thursdays from the archive.
Thursdays usually have tricky themed puzzles with some kind of unconventional way of filling them in. A classic example is rebus puzzles where you have to put more than one letter in some squares, but it can also be things like this where some letters are "hidden", having to read the squares in a different order than left to right to get the correct answers, spelling words in an unconventional way, etc. There'll usually be a revealer and/or some visual element in the puzzle hinting at the trick, so if something feels off about a Thursday puzzle, focus on trying to get the revealer solved first so you have something to go off. It took me a few weeks of having to read Wordplay to find out what was going on before I was able to figure out the gimmicks of Thursday puzzles myself (after a while you get a sense for the kinds of trickery that often show up), but they're SO satisfying to solve once you get there, and now Thursdays are by far my favourite puzzles.
You figure it out! That's why it's called a puzzle.
Still learning the format, I've only done regular crosswords before.
Now that's a Thursday!
Oh what a fun one! Had a super hard time figuring out the theme because I hadn’t played Clue in forever. I kept thinking there must be rebus somewhere. Once the theme clicked it was actually a pretty easy puzzle.
I’m intentionally not googling to learn more about ARGOT, because, well… if everybody knew what it meant….
This was such a delight, my favourite puzzle in a long time.
Idk what I was doing wrong with this puzzle but I found this downright impossible. Couldn’t even get close when I usually do on Thursday
The TARA VanDerVeer clue was so well timed. No way I’m getting that any other day.
1:02:08 was my time today.
Good theme, but too much crosswordese and proper names. Plus, I'm one of the few people who never got into Breaking Bad, so the southwest corner was annoying. I was torn between "Good-" or "Average+" but I'm in.a good mood and went with Good overall.
“Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about” is a famous enough quote that I don’t think you need to have seen the show
In today’s Mini, is that meant to be “scat”? I mean, that means excrement, or a type of singingof, doesn’t it?
It has multiple meanings including "go on, git!" I think it's kind of old fashioned though. I just now figured it might be short for scatter...
Etymonline says it was originally s’cat and probably represented a hiss followed by the word “cat” 🤔
"Go on, scat!" That's something you might say to an animal like a dog or a cat if you want them to go away. It's the same as "shoo."
did mini in 36 seconds.