WSJ (Contest) Grid: 25 minutes; Meta: an hour 
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Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “By No Means” — Conrad’s writeup
This week we’re looking a two-syllable, four-letter word. There were no obvious theme entries beyond the center entry: AVERAGE, clued as Arithmetic mean (which should be helpful in solving the contest). “Mean” mirrored a title word, so that was clearly important. I noted the oddly specific two-syllable nudge, and figured that the answer would have an (incorrect) four-letter anagram.
I spun my wheels for a bit, and I suspect I have plenty of company in that regard. The puzzle’s frequency analysis showed that something was definitely going on in that department. Here’s the analysis via Mechapuzzle:
Mechapuzzle frequency analysis
The frequency of the letters in AVERAGE were higher than expected, but that turned into a dead end. Then I spotted 1a: BONY, an anagram of “By No”. Each of those characters occurred twice in the grid: once in BONY itself, and then once again. B was in grid squares 1 and 35. 1 + 35 = 36, and half of that (the average of the two numbers) is 18, which contained a V in the grid.
WSJ Contest – 05.23.2025
- B (1) + (35) = 36/2 = 18 = V
- O (2) + (30) = 32/2 = 16 = E
- N (3) + (65) = 68/2 = 34 = T
- Y (4) + (56) = 60/2 = 30 = O
Following the order in BONY: the mapped letters spell our contest solution VETO. That anagrams to VOTE, explaining why Mike added the two-syllable nudge.
Fun puzzle! I frequently describe Mike as “surgical,” and this puzzle is an example of that. He often uses center entries and corners for important clues, as he did here. And the answer is a no-doubter. Solvers often describe Mike as “literal,” which also fits here: By No Means meant take the arithmetic means of the grid entries of BYNO. Frequency distribution is a tried–and–true meta crossword technique. It’s easy to miss (and tools like Mechapuzzle help for those of us who solve .puz files). Solvers: please share your thoughts. I’ll end with a non-meta related song that’s been playing rent free in my head for the past week.
neat trick, no chance here.
Was thinking the four longish acrosses could be split in two, maybe as DR/EDGERS, EATS/CROW, REW/ARMED, HEAT/SEAL and each half would be an alternate answer to another clue (then average those clue numbers), but I only saw REW for REC at 46D.
Me too. We spotted by no and bony but could not figure out what to do with it. V clever.
Hot damn!
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 4.5 stars
No way I could solve this, freaking 5d chess here
Ah bummer! I fell into the classic cryptic crossword trap of assuming the wrong phrase was the indicator. I thought “By No” was telling us to look for things not next to the letters in MEANS, or something. I never considered that “Means” was the indicator of the mechanism, even though I knew it had to be because of AVERAGE. I just never flipped the title around correctly. Nice meta!
Technical question here. How do you get the .puz file for the WSJ crossword?
I’ve often seen people reference solving the WSJ puzzle using a .puz file, but I’ve never figured out how to get the .puz file myself.
I use the Shortyz app and it imports the puzzle automatically.
Right up at the top of this page, the second tab is “Today’s puzzles” and it has the link. (Change the date if it’s not Friday when you want to download it.)
Also
https://herbach.dnsalias.com/wsj/contest.puz
is always this week’s contest puzzle. All files are available about 5 minutes after WSJ posting time.
To avoid having to mess with the url before the current puzzle is linked here, you can also use the calendar page at
https://www.fleetingimage.com/wij/xyzzy/25-wsj.html
Wow Martin, your technical know-how and all-around intelligence continues to impress the heck out of me!
And we all give you a big “Thank You” for making this website special!
Thanks for the thanks!
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 3 stars
AS-IS was my last ditch guess. Missed the right answer by several sigmas…guess I need to upgrade my double entendre radar.
Sadly, this meta contest broke my 4 week streak. I honestly think you could have locked me in a cell for 100 years and I don’t think I would have gotten this. I understand, Conrad, you used your letter frequency tool. I saw BONY in the grid and realized it was an anagram of BY NO – and I also noticed that there was only one other letter O. I spent a whole lot of time adding up and averaging the total letter values of words. Not averaging the clue numbers. Normally, I’m a huge fan of Mike Shenk and admire his genius, but this one fell completely flat for me.
HaHa, that second sentence brought a smile to my face. Too tough for me.
Way out of my wheelhouse. I submitted ZERO. Which is the score I probably deserve for not getting it at all. Since Arithmetic Mean is the sum of a group of numbers divided by the count, I assumed we were looking for a number. Not many four letter two syllable numbers. ZERO seemed a possibility. My uncle used to pronounce NINE as a two syllable word, as did telephone operators in old movies. Kudos to Conrad. You deserve a whole set of coffee mugs for solving this one.
The letters don’t just anagram to VOTE, they also spell VOTE if you map them to BY NO (which, as you point out, is why the two-syllable hint is there). Wonder if that was intentional. Either way, I did notice the letters appeared twice but didn’t make the next step connection. I also thought there might be a letter distribution theme but I solve on paper and wasn’t about to do it by hand so at least I didn’t go down that rabbit hole.
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 4 stars
I also did a letter distribution. Then I took the distribution for each letter in AVERAGE and calculated the average:
A 29
V 4
E 32
R 17
A 29
G 4
E 32
———
147 / 7 = 21
21 is the grid coordinate for GEMMA, and the A in GEMMA is also the starting A in AVERAGE.
So then I wondered if I just used the vowels what I would get. After all, the vowels are A and E, which have the two highest occurrences in the grid.
Well, the average of those four is 30.5. At 30 Down is ORECK. Starting with O and ending K is OK, and in four-letter form is OKAY, a two-syllable word that is an acceptable answer to, “How was your day?” In that sense, average and okay agree.
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 5 stars
I just tried taking the arithmetic mean of all the clue numbers from 1-65 to get 33. The entry at 33-A was RAMA, but I didn’t have the nerve to submit that, as it seemed pretty random and unrelated to anything else in the puzzle. The actual mechanism and answer are super elegant, leaving me to SMH and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Yes, RAMA was all I got, and I was going to submit it but forgot, basically. I just checked and it was not a popular wrong answer, I thought it would be.