Analyzing...

Analysis

There are 15 rows and 15 columns, with 0 circles, 0 rebus squares, and no cheater squares.

The grid uses 22 of 26 letters, missing FWXZ.

It has normal 180-degree rotational crossword symmetry.

Average word length: 5.36, Scrabble score: 307, Scrabble average: 1.59.

Puzzle has 5 fill-in-the-blank clues and 0 cross-reference clues.

This puzzle has 6 unique answer words.

It has 3 words that debuted in this puzzle and were later reused:

These words are unique to the Shortz Era but have appeared in pre-Shortz puzzles:

These 42 answer words are not legal Scrabble™ entries, which sometimes means they are interesting:

Day of week comparisons

The green highlighted squares show which daily puzzle average is closest to this puzzle for each statistical category.

Distribution of answer words by length

Letter distribution

Scrabble Score: 1 2 3 4 5 8 10

Thumbnails for 1/8/2005

Various thumbnail views are shown:

Standard view shows the grid pattern most clearly

Open Squares (those which don't touch any block, even diagonally) are blue

Vowel distribution

Scrabble score uses the same color key as above

Freshness view shows unique answers in red (see colorized grid below)

With answers

Puzzles that may be similar to this one

Crosswords that share the most words with this one (excluding Sundays):

Unusual or long words that appear elsewhere:

Identical grids

Other puzzles with the same block pattern as this one:

Topologically similar grids

Other crosswords with exactly 32 blocks, 72 words, 79 open squares, and an average word length of 5.36:

Colorized grid

The next two sections attempt to show how fresh the grid entries are.

In this view, unusual answers are colored depending on how often they have appeared in other puzzles.

Unique answers are in red, red overwrites orange which overwrites yellow, etc.

Unique 1 other 2 others 3 others 4 others

Freshness Factor

FF: 49.3 – 72.5 percentile, 27.5 Saturday percentile

Freshness Factor is a calculation that compares the number of times words in this puzzle have appeared in other Shortz Era puzzles.

Click here for an explanation.

The chart below shows how many times each word has been used across all NYT puzzles, old and modern including Variety.