A couple of warnings before we begin:
- This post contains spoilers for some older Acrostic puzzles. If you’re planning on working your way through them, avert your eyes now.
- This post contains a story that might imply surprising sexual conduct. Viewer discretion advised.
Acrostics seem to involve a different part of the solving brain than crosswords. People who love one don’t necessarily love the other. Our mail shows how passionate acrostic fans can be.
We have an acrostic solver on XWord Info, created mostly to shame the NYT into improving their old one. Ours doesn’t get used as much as it once did because the NYT solver is now excellent. We do have a few features theirs doesn’t – fancy tooltips as you hover over the grid, constructor photos, and what we call the “Full Quote.”
All the NYT acrostics are by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, so we’ve learned a lot about them over the years. They have a deep curiosity about the world and, I’m guessing, an eclectic library. Many of the books they choose are non-fiction, on topics such as history, biology, philosophy, and language, but they also pull from a wide range of fiction.
It can’t be easy to construct great acrostics. You find an interesting book and dig up a compelling quote. You trim it down to 216 characters, including spaces and hyphens, but no other punctuation, by carefully eliminating less important words. Then you carve up the remaining letters and rearrange them into no more than 26 captivating answer words. Sometimes those constraints mean that juicy parts of the quote end up on the cutting room floor.
After you solve the acrostic online, you see the quote with correct capitalization and punctuation, but often with tantalizing ellipses indicating something is missing. Generally what’s missing isn’t important, but if the full quote is different enough and interesting enough, the XWord Info solver will show you both the trimmed and full versions so you can get the bigger picture.
Here are a few examples. (Remember the spoiler caution!)
An already perfect quote
The February 16, 2020 acrostic reveals a quote about love. It’s exactly the right length, so nothing is missing:
(ANDREW SEAN) GREER, THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE — Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you’ve always dreamed, yet you don’t have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to move it.
A quote with missing details
The August 2, 2020 acrostic is fine, but the full quote has many more fun collective noun examples:
(PHIL) COUSINEAU, THE PAINTED WORD — The English language is studded with terrific group nouns… a crash of rhinoceros, a parliament of owls, a skulk of foxes,… a zeal of zebras…. [C]oinages include… a couch of video game players, and a cuddle of homecoming queens.
Full quote:
The English language is studded with terrific group nouns, which faintly echo the terminology of animals include a crash of rhinoceros, a parliament of owls, a skulk of foxes, a skein of geese, a zeal of zebras; human ones include an oversight of academics, a trove of libraries, an essence of existentialists, a discord of experts, a conjunction of grammarians, a banner of knights, a drift of lecturers, a lapsus of linguists, a logorrhea of lexicographers, an abomination of monks, a walk of peripatetics, a gloss of philologists, a brood of researchers, a scrum of philosophers, and a bliss of unicorns. Recent coinages include a sandlot of Little Leaguers, a couch of video game players, and a cuddle of homecoming queens.
A dropped revelation
The June 11, 2017 acrostic uncovers a charming story about Chuck Berry. The full quote gives surprising context:
CHUCK BERRY, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY — I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I’d been told my great grandfather lived “way back up in the woods among the evergreens” in a log cabin. I revived the era with a story about a… boy named Johnny B. Goode.
Full quote:
The gateway from freedom, I was led to understand, was somewhere “close to New Orleans” where most Africans were sorted through and sold. I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I’d been told my great grandfather lived “way back up in the woods among the evergreens” in a log cabin. I revived the era with a story about a “colored boy named Johnny B. Goode.” My first thought was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say “colored boy” and changed it to “country boy”.
The sexiest ride at the fair
The August 18, 2019 acrostic takes us on a roller-coaster ride.
The edited quote is already excellent, but it’s just a list. The missing details turn it into a story. (The “in quantities that resist rational explanation” here is brilliant writing.)
STEVE RUSHIN, HIGH ROLLERS — Toupees, tube tops, car keys, cameras,… inhibitions, and lunch. A great many things are routinely lost on roller coasters… . [W]orkers… in England drained the… pool beneath two coasters and found twenty-five sets of false teeth.
Full quote:
Toupees, tube tops, car keys, cameras, cares, inhibitions, and lunch. A great many things are routinely lost on roller coasters, as demonstrated by the items found on, near, or beneath the tracks. These include glass eyes, hearing aids, and — in quantities that resist rational explanation — underpants.
“False teeth,” adds Ronald V. Toomer, revered architect of approximately eighty coasters worldwide. “They find lots of false teeth.” In 1994 workers at the Pleasure Beach amusement park in England drained the reflecting pool beneath two coasters and found twenty-five sets of false teeth.