Crossword 2026-10-16
The clock starts when you hit Start — server-timed.
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How to play the crossword
- Click a square and start typing. Click the same square again to flip between Across and Down.
- The bar under the grid shows the clue you’re on. The ‹ › buttons step through clues, or click any clue in the lists.
- Arrow keys move, Backspace deletes and steps back.
- It checks itself the moment every square is filled — or hit Check whenever you want.
Read today’s clues — 37 Across · 35 Down
Across
- Unit of pressure named for a French thinker
- Actor Stonestreet of "Modern Family"
- Butterfly, in Spanish
- Nectar of immortality in Hindu myth
- Periodic table entries
- Schubert art songs
- Keyboard key near the space bar
- Christmas ___
- Chatbots and such, for short
- Ambulance pro, for short
- Deadlock on the scoreboard
- Gets from a source
- Building addition
- One more than eighteen
- Wrapped up
- Actress Longoria
- Tango or waltz
- Taiwanese PC maker
- ___ Lingus (Irish airline)
- Puff at birthday candles
- Start a tennis point
- Attempt
- Quarters and dimes
- Concentrated extracts, like vanilla and almond
- Freight
- Overdue payments
- "Let me think..."
- Glowing sphere
- Liberal arts degrees: Abbr.
- Gangster's gun, in old slang
- Aunt, in Spanish
- Oyster gems
- Anonymous
- Follows as a result
- Publishing house labels
- Memo
- Teen bedrooms, often
Down
- Fakers, or Chrissie Hynde's band
- Goal
- Broke the limit on the highway
- Bulging outward
- Daisylike fall flower
- ___ Vegas
- Before, poetically
- Amusement park attraction
- Couple in the gossip column
- Supermarket wheels
- Butcher's stock
- NATO and the like
- E.T., for one
- Didn't catch
- Bird house at the zoo
- Opposite, mathematically speaking
- Chutzpah
- Small drum often paired with a fife
- Educates
- Keynes or Friedman
- Evening broadcast staple
- Simplicity
- Diners
- Make possible
- Furniture wheels
- Tasteless
- Charley horses
- "Bring your ___!" (coach's demand)
- Physics quantity measured in kilograms
- Ajar
- Nevada city
- Plant fiber used in matting
- Regret
- Matchstick game
- Fib
The clock doesn’t start until you hit Start. Reading ahead is legal; what it does to your bragging rights is between you and your conscience.
How to play the crossword
- Click a square and start typing. Click the same square again to flip between Across and Down.
- The bar under the grid shows the clue you’re on. The ‹ › buttons step through clues, or click any clue in the lists.
- Arrow keys move, Backspace deletes and steps back.
- It checks itself the moment every square is filled — or hit Check whenever you want.
A free daily 15×15 crossword, played for time
There’s a new fifteen-by-fifteen here every day at midnight Eastern — free, no account needed, no metered paywall waiting three solves in. No themes, either: no circled letters spelling a pun, no revealer to reverse-engineer. Just seventy-plus answers, clued straight, crossing where they claim to — hard enough to be worth doing, never hard because it cheated.
The clock is the point
Hit Start and the server starts counting — not your browser. Your solve is timed between the server seeing Start and the server receiving the finished grid, then replayed keystroke by keystroke to confirm it happened the way you say it did. A pasted-in solution has no believable history; a scripted one has no human rhythm. That’s what the ✓ next to a time means, and it’s why nobody argues about the clock here — they argue about the clue. The full four-check gauntlet is laid out in how the honest board works.
Getting faster
Speed solving is habits, not vocabulary. Work the short answers first — threes and fours fall fastest and hand every long answer its skeleton. Never fight one clue: skip it, let the crossings do the work, come back. Type through what you’re sure of, and when a crossing feels off, use Check Word — it judges the whole entry without marking individual squares, so it costs you pride, not answers. And solve every day: the difference between a twenty-minute solver and an eight-minute one is usually about ninety mornings.
Missed a day? Every grid we’ve run is in the crossword archive.