Crosswords are easier on Monday and become gradually more difficult through to Saturday, but what makes a crossword difficult?
Some answer words might be more appropriate for a later-week puzzle. When you enter a word, as opposed to a pattern, in the Finder Page, you see a graph showing usage over time, and a new graph displaying occurrences by day of week. (Phone screens are too small to show the graphs — view them on your Mac or PC.) There are certainly some late-week-only answers, but the day-of-week distribution is often fairly uniform. Or maybe random.
That’s because difficulty is more often determined by clues. Many crossword tournaments have identical puzzles that can be solved with easy or hard clues.
Select the new by day of week button in the yellow options box and enter a few more words. This time you’ll see the easier Monday clues first and can watch how difficulty tends to increase as the week goes on. A clue for most answer words can be anywhere from trivial to nefarious.
Some examples
Clues for ECHO:
- Monday: “Reverberation”
- Tuesday: “Bounce back”
- Wednesday: “Parrot”
- Thursday: “Return to sender”
- Friday: “Second coming”
- Saturday: “Pursuit of Pan”
Clues for PART:
- Monday: “Line made by a comb”
- Tuesday: “Go separate ways”
- Wednesday: “Result of hair-splitting?”
- Thursday: “Tenor in a barbershop quartet, e.g.”
- Friday: “Sunder”
- Saturday: “It’s cast”
Clues for SPEED:
- Monday: “What a radar gun measures”
- Tuesday: “Methamphetamine”
- Wednesday: “Tear”
- Friday: “Word with dating or skating”
- Saturday: “Ticket number?”
Clues for ELOPE:
- Monday: “Skip the elaborate wedding, say”
- Tuesday: “Marry a cutie on the q.t., maybe”
- Wednesday: “Split to unite”
- Thursday: “Not get reception?”
- Friday: “Secretly unionize?”
- Saturday: “Get a running mate?”
To be clear, these are only examples. Almost any clue can be fair for any day with the right crossings.
Fine print: sorting by day of week is only relevant for Modern Era puzzles because graduated difficulty is a Will Shortz innovation.