A Thousand Words
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SUNDAY PUZZLE — Christina Iverson, of Ames, Iowa, is an assistant puzzle editor for The Times. She reviews crossword submissions and helps edit the accepted ones for publication. Her puzzle started as an 11-by-11 grid in which every clue was an emoji and evolved into this larger production, which is the first time that drawings have served as clues for a Times daily crossword puzzle. If you’re wondering who the artist is, it’s the constructor! Christina said, “I had hoped to convince someone to draw the pictures for me but had no luck, so I drew them all myself.”
I found the illustrations charming and love the concept of visual clues — I hope we see future examples. So I mean no offense at all when I say that I needed crossing letters to decipher at least one of them, which I was sure was a gumball machine that had spilled its contents. Once I was able to deduce it, though, the doodle made perfect sense.
Today’s Theme
Hey, who put hieroglyphics in my crossword puzzle? That’s what I initially thought this theme set was. There are no words for the clues at 23-, 38-, 49-, 66-, 82-, 95- and 114-Across; instead, we have a series of images to decipher. They don’t seem to have anything in common at first, and the puzzle’s title, “A Thousand Words,” underlines the many ways an observer can interpret each drawing.
Nothing else to do than figure out what one or two mean, then. I had a lot of down entries filled in at the bottom of the grid and enough crossing letters to give me the entry for 114-Across, a depiction of someone swinging a golf club and someone with a kind of racket, I think: SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. Or, in reference to the two action figures in the drawing, SPORTS, ILLUSTRATED.
Source: The New York Times
