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Around January in these parts we run a test on the dictionaries’ words of the year. Our thinking is that if a word really has left online cliques and entered general use, a crossword setter will have used it, as crosswords have historically been faster at recording language than the dictionaries themselves.
Of 2025’s winning words, VIBE CODING (Collins) and PARASOCIAL (Cambridge) are nowhere to be seen in puzzles. I expect to see SLOP (Merriam-Webster) in its new AI-generated sense before long, as my sense is that it’s genuinely useful and moving toward more general comprehension.
Dictionary.com’s 6-7 (SIX-SEVEN) is harder to nail down. The rest are close to Oxford’s entry, RAGE BAIT, so we can mark 2025 as another non-bumper crop.
Students of grid construction will have noted some striking and memorable grids in the period after Christmas: this is due to a new, annual brief amnesty. One of 2026’s non-Guardian grids is already in place!
We should also respond to this startling opening to a Stuart Heritage profile of Pluribus star Rhea Seehorn:
‘You gotta tell me how to crack the code,’ she pleads before we’ve even said hello. ‘I’m an avid crossword puzzler, but I cannot beat the Guardian crossword. I cannot crack it, and I need to figure out what the problem is.’
Rhea, you and the Guardian think alike. Since April 2024, we have given away the code: our quick cryptic puzzle (archive here) uniquely tells solvers how the wordplay works.
The plan is that solvers can move from that to our beginner-friendly quiptic, using our “for beginners” guides or the help of a friend. Then on to Monday and before the new solver knows it, he or she will be solving our hardest series, the Genius. There is no problem here.
Pangakupu’s prize Genius puzzle was perfect for many of us in December as the redundant words spell all but the last word of a quotation:
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
This helps to explain why answers such as GRUMBLIER and RIOT ACT need to go into the grid as LIMBURGER and RICOTTA, and the author of the still-valid quote, CHESTERTON, is hiding in the fifth column.
January’s Genius appears in January for a reason and is there for you now. And in our cluing conference, thanks for your clues for CAT BURNS.
At risk of seeming to endorse unwieldy clues, one of the runners-up is AlfBaked’s series-summary: “She left the show Faithless, topping Charlotte and Tom, banishing unfaithful Rossy before Alan finally succeeded”. The other is another of our impromptu pairings: Newlaplandes and Falconbridge’s “Bound to lie, somehow this singer’s inscrutable?”. The winner, partly for the freshness of an entry that looks like a Wikipedia heading, is “Tom Brooks (music producer)”.
Kludos to OKCyuPSkr and please leave entries for CODE below, along with any favourite clues or puzzles you have spotted.
