Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Love Letters” — Conrad’s writeup.
This week we’re looking for a word that might be used in a love letter. The long center horizontal entry served as the only theme entry:
- HUGSANDKISSES: [What OXXO might represent in a love letter
WSJ Contest – 02.16.2025
Mike should have used XOXO, so I figured that OXXO was important. I tried to find a signal in the other long acrosses and found nothing. I scanned the grid for X’s and O’s: plenty of O’s, but zero X’s. I checked the clues for X’s: nothing stood out. I eventually noticed the cluster of doubled D’s in the upper left, mainly because the LYDDA/SKIDDY crossing struck me as an odd. Mike doesn’t normally use obscure fill like LYDDA unless it’s there to serve the mechanism. SKIDDY also felt awkward: I’ve never called a road skiddy, but maybe that’s a regional thing.
Doubled letters are a famous meta dead end, but they worked out this time. The doubled D’s formed an O in the grid. I spotted the other O in the lower right next, formed with R’s. It took me longer to find the X’s, but I saved time by backsolving the missing E and A. The OXXO grid shapes are comprised of the letters of our contest solution DEAR. Solvers: please share your thoughts.
Yeah, Colin, I typically don’t chase double letters but the OXXO clue rather than XOXO sent me off on the wild goose chase. In the across answers I found 2 pairs of SS, DD, RR, and LL.along with one pair of OO and EE. It seemed like more double letters than usual.
I quickly abandoned this useless rabbit hole and turned to the notion of romantic text abbreviations; e.g. ILY (I love you), and saw the final across entry, IDLY. Remove the D and you have the love letters ILY. Could there be others? Is this the rabbit? No on both counts.
At this point I was ready to wave the white flag but a friend told me that the Ds and Rs formed an O. I immediately moved the entries to a spreadsheet where I quickly saw the Es and As forming an X. Although the design is impressive I’m not a big fan of this type of visual META. It seems unnecessarily difficult and the OXXO rather than standard XOXO clue unnecesarily distracting. Just my opinion.Ultimately I submitted the correct answer thanks to help from a friend.
LOVEly construction. But I started out as you did, thinking “Hmmm. Normally the pattern is ‘XOXO’ not ‘OXXO’.” So I found three entries in the grid with that pattern: 7d SEES; 18d ADDAms; and 46a ERREd. Giving me the letters S E A D M R. Anagram “DREAMS.” But Mr. Shenk doesn’t usually make us work that hard, and it felt inelegant. Next, I found the pattern of DDs and RRs that formed O-figures in the grid. Inside the O-figures are two letters: SE in the top left D-quadrant and OA in the bottom right R-quadrant. DSE plus ROA gives an anagram….ADORES. Again, too much work! I quickly spotted the two X-figures after that, and admired the simplicity of design.
I learned my lesson from the HOSPITAL CORNERS meta. The theme itself (i.e. HUGS AND KISSES) is not necessarily going to be relevant, word-wise (CORNERS was on that one but not HOSPITAL, and that was my downfall). And OXXO was suspect from the get-go. Saw one of the D or R circles first and gasped. Lots of fun!
Seeing the double D and double R, I immediately guessed the answer would be DEAR. The only work left was to figure out why DOVECOT only had one E but FATALLY had two As, and then I saw the Xs and Os.
There’s actually another way to come about the answer that’s a total coincidence. There are two spots in the grid where 4 letters follow the pattern OXXO: ADDAMS and ERRED. Take the four letters in the pattern and anagram them to get DEAR.
I saw this first, but knew it had to be wrong because 1) it’s only two random answers in the whole grid, which never happens, and 2) usually you don’t have to do random anagramming to get the answer. So I went looking again and found the real solution. Interesting that it gives the same answer!
My friend actually solved it this wrong way without seeing the right way, until he and I compared notes.
Eek I didn’t even see SEES! Just saw Robin’s comment. Though if you follow the consonants and vowels, only ADDA and ERRE work.
First thing I noticed was the typo OXXO. Then found the DD and RR boxes (didn’t look like circles to me.) And thought the LLs at bottom left were apt. But none of it made sense. I suppose these look different on a phone or computer than on paper. Rather ungainly. Plus the FedEx store printer which I use still makes all the O’s in the clue numbers into X’s. (It only does this with WSJ puzzles btw) So 10 across reads 1X. I ended up submitting SWAK because frankly my DEAR I didn’t give a damn.
I went down the double letter rabbit hole as well, didn’t find anything and left it until Sunday evening. I finally noticed the D and R circles and then the E and lastly the A. I almost gave up on this one, but perseverance paid off.
MIDDAYmeal had me thinking NOON like the OXXO pattern. I never got away from this thought. But a nice puzzle nevertheless.
Completely glossed the OXXO ordering. Conversely, SKIDDY and LYDDA screamed to me, making the O shape quite apparent, and it was trivial to find the other theme elements.
My husband often points out the multiple double letters in a grid and he generally gets short shrift from me as there always are and they rarely mean anything. Fortunately he stood his ground on this occasion and we were quickly to the answer 🤗
I stumbled upon the metanism when I used this tool (https://boisvert42.github.io/mechapuzzle/) to see how D (15 of them) was distributed in my .puz version of the crossword.
Where do you get the .puz version of the WSJ?
Here: https://crosswordfiend.com/download/
The meta drops at 4:00PM Friday EST, but the daily link will point to Thursday’s puzzle until midnight. You can manually edit the URL just after 4:00PM and add a day to get the meta.
You can also install the Crossword Scraper plugin in Chrome or Firefox (scroll down): https://github.com/jpd236/CrosswordScraper
Then surf to https://www.wsj.com/news/puzzle, click on the meta, and click on the Crossword Scraper plugin in your browser.
Thank you!
You can also use
https://herbach.dnsalias.com/wsj/contest.puz
That will give you the latest Friday crossword. It, and the daily link posted at Today’s Puzzles, will be available at about 4:05 ET.