#CROSSWORDS PUZZLES CODE#
#CROSSWORDS PUZZLES PROFESSIONAL#
#CROSSWORDS PUZZLES SERIES#

“It’s hard to construct a good crossword. “The animating impulse of crosswords is, ‘How can I do something new in this medium?’” said Ben Tausig, editor of the American Values Club crossword.īut Parker said he doesn’t quite see it that way: “For themes to be the same is not an unusual thing in crosswords.”

#CROSSWORDS PUZZLES CODE#

There’s no rule book or official code of ethics in the urbane world of crossword puzzle construction, but it’s generally understood that copying a puzzle’s theme - using the exact clues and exact answers as another puzzle - infringes upon the original work of a puzzle constructor. Original themes, unique grids, fresh fill and clever clues are the currency of construction. But those smaller words are just mortar - they aren’t the bricks that puzzle designers spend all their time baking.

The clues: The things the solver reads, and ponders, before scribbling answers into the grid.Ĭrosswords are ripe with repetitions in the fill - “ERA,” for example, has been used 480 times in the last 23 years of New York Times crossword puzzles.

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The grid: The series of white and black squares - the scaffolding onto which the puzzle is built.

Computers nowadays can aid in finding suitable fill. The fill: The rest of the answers in the puzzle.The theme answers are usually the longest answers in the grid and are tied together by some clever conceit. The theme: A crossword puzzle’s identity - it’s why a puzzle is memorable, or clever, or creative, or funny, and it’s the toughest part to execute when constructing a puzzle.To understand why Parker’s repetitions cut against crossword norms, it helps to understand what a crossword puzzle is made of. Parker’s crossword ventures, according to a 2003 article in People, made him a “multimillionaire.” Its other clients include CBS News, Merriam-Webster, Smithsonian Magazine and Yahoo. In 2000, Parker earned a Guinness record for “most syndicated puzzle compiler.” There’s no public list of Universal’s clients, but its newspaper clients include the New York Daily News, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Denver Post and Hartford Courant. Parker has been the editor of the Universal Crossword for over 15 years and began editing the USA Today Crossword in 2003. It’s unethical, and I would never publish a person who plagiarizes another person’s work.” “This would never have come to light except in the electronic age, where you can track these things.” He added: “To me, it’s an obvious case of plagiarism. “I have never heard of something like this happening before,” he told me. Will Shortz, the puzzle editor for The New York Times, was taken aback by Parker’s replications. FiveThirtyEight reached out to USA Today for comment several times but received no response.ġ,090 Universal puzzles and 447 USA Today puzzles were at least a 75 percent match to an earlier puzzle On Friday, a publicity coordinator for Universal Uclick, Julie Halper, said the company declined to comment on the allegations. (The copyright to both puzzles is held by Universal Uclick, which grew out of the former Universal Press Syndicate and calls itself “the leading distributor of daily puzzle and word games.”) USA Today is one of the country’s highest-circulation newspapers, and the Universal Crossword is syndicated to hundreds of newspapers and websites. Nearly all this replication was found in two crosswords series edited by Parker: the USA Today Crossword and the syndicated Universal Crossword. Most of those have been republished under fake author names. Hundreds more of the puzzles edited by Parker are nearly verbatim copies of previous puzzles that Parker also edited. The puzzles in question repeated themes, answers, grids and clues from Times puzzles published years earlier. Since 1999, Timothy Parker, editor of one of the nation’s most widely syndicated crosswords, has edited more than 60 individual puzzles that copy elements from New York Times puzzles, often with pseudonyms for bylines, a new database has helped reveal.

#CROSSWORDS PUZZLES PROFESSIONAL#

A group of eagle-eyed puzzlers, using digital tools, has uncovered a pattern of copying in the professional crossword-puzzle world that has led to accusations of plagiarism and false identity.

Crosswords puzzles