Here’s Why The Times’s First Crossword Is Nearly Impossible to Solve Today
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }175 Years of The TimesOn The New York Times’s AnniversaryVideo: ‘Madam President’8 Fashion TrendsA Daring AviatorOpinion: My Marriage 180Quiz: Know the Times?You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. 1, 2026This story is part of a series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism from The New York Times. Read more here.The New York Times ran its first-ever crossword puzzle 84 years ago.
- ▪#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }175 Years of The TimesOn The New York Times’s AnniversaryVideo: ‘Madam President’8 Fashion TrendsA Daring AviatorOpinion: My Marriage 180Quiz: Know the Times?You have a preview vie
- ▪1, 2026This story is part of a series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism from The New York Times.
- ▪Read more here.The New York Times ran its first-ever crossword puzzle 84 years ago.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | NYT — Home |
| Canonical URL | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/crosswords/times-first-crossword-puzzle.html |
| Publication time | Thu, 01 Oct 2026 09:02:22 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-01T10:57:31.925Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-01T10:57:31.925Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | EHRFm2_TcdIf · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }175 Years of The TimesOn The New York Times’s AnniversaryVideo: ‘Madam President’8 Fashion TrendsA Daring AviatorOpinion: My Marriage 180Quiz: Know the Times?You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.Credit...Joan WongSkip to contentSkip to site indexHere’s Why The Times’s First Crossword Is Nearly Impossible to Solve TodayEven Will Shortz has no trouble admitting that it’s a doozy.Credit...Joan WongSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTListen · 8:41 min Share full article0By Anna Kaufman and Sam EzerskyOct. 1, 2026This story is part of a series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism from The New York Times.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at NYT — Home.
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