![]() So, a word that is not familiar to people, like “parer.Of large size or extent great extensive hence, relatively great greatest chief principal as, a grand mountain a grand army a grand mistake. I hope I don’t miss anything, but editing is fallible just like everything else. That’s something that I focus on as an editor. And we do get complaints about secondary meanings. People don’t like when a word feels unfair in that way that you have four letters in place, and there are still a lot of letters that could complete that word. What kinds of words prompt the most complaints from fans?Īctually, we get more complaints about broken streaks than anything else. Wordle, created by software engineer Josh Wardle, became hugely popular in late 2021 and was acquired by The New York Times in January 2022. One exception I can think of is if we did have guest editors, I probably wouldn’t edit their editing, except for things like derogatory meanings or something that’s already run. A themed answer would still need to feel random, be unexpected, surprising, and possibly rare. I think it would still need to be random. So I don’t see it as off the table, but I think it would look really different. I don’t work in a vacuum without people behind me and under me supporting my progress. It hasn’t been decided even that would be a team decision. Have there been words nixed for being too topical or not appropriate for other reasons? Last May, the word "fetus" was dropped because it was too close to the news. So, that’s based on luck, rather than deduction. There are only six guesses so even if you have already figured out four correct letters, you still have more letters to guess than there are. That fifth letter - found, mound, round, sound - there’s like eight of them, I think. I also run through letters, so if you have a word that has very common letters, and you have four letters in place - like, for example, blank-o-u-n-d. And I wouldn’t want to run a word like that. And then I research them, so I will look through dictionaries and Google, and I’ll try to find out if there are any, like, secondary meanings that are maybe either profane or derogatory. First of all, I usually use a random number generator, some kind of random process to pick the words. What are you thinking about when you choose each word? I worked for 30 years in mathematical copy editing in Ann Arbor. But we were in a pandemic and they were already kind of shifting to more remote work and were able to hire me and that’s been just like my dream job. ![]() I applied for a job at The New York Times when it became available, not expecting to get it, just thinking it was a real wild card because I lived in Michigan, not in New York. And that is where I kind of started to learn how to edit, as opposed to just construct and write clues. ![]() ![]() I still make puzzles for Bust magazine, which is a feminist magazine. And that was about a decade ago, so I’ve been making crossword puzzles for about a decade. But in my 40s, I got the bug to try to make puzzles, which is a whole different thing than solving. And then, like, fast forward many years, I’ve always solved the puzzle. So in my teens, I started to kind of obsessively solve the Sunday crossword puzzle in The New York Times. And then, as I grew up, I started to get into specifically crossword puzzles. When I was young, I really loved puzzles - jigsaw puzzles, word puzzles, word games.
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