Glossary of Crossword Terminology

All professions have their share of ridiculous or obscure words; crosswords are no exception. This nice video by Ross Trudeau goes through some of the most common terms in two minutes flat... but there are more so, so, so many more words that get thrown around casually by people in the "crossworld" that make absolutely no sense to a layperson, that I feel like it's worth making a list of them.

Agent nouns are words like pusher, dealer, gamer, et al - words derived by taking a verb and adding an "-er." Tricky crosswords are prone to use these as a common form of misdirection - [African flower] as a clue for NILE, for instance, with "flower" better read as "flow-er," read, a thing that flows. Shuchismita Upadhyay has helpfully compiled a list of such words that are prone to appear in puzzles.

Asym is short for "asymmetrical" - referring to a puzzle where the grid has no axes of symmetry.

A bangit (a.k.a. a "banger") is a crossword clue phrased as a command and usually ended with an exclamation point, e.g. [Beat it!] as a clue for DRUM, or [Screw it!] for LIGHTBULB. The term "bangit" was invented by yours truly in 2020 in response to an uptick of bangit usage among my cohort of new wave indie constructors, but this sort of clue is neither new nor exclusive to the indies.

A cheater square (usually called "cheaters" in the plural) is a black square that could be removed from a crossword grid without changing the number of words in that grid. In most crosswords a Some constructors have given these the warmer-fuzzier name "helper squares" to try to rehab their image.

A dook is an entry consisting of multiple words that has been misparsed by the solver as an obscure single word, e.g., when you see TOAT clued as [Perfectly] and assume "toat" is some adverb too obscure for Merriam-Webster and then realize, oh, that's supposed to be read as "to a T." The term is used jokingly in reference to a New York Times grid from Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2014, in which constructor Joel Lafargue clued DO OK as [Scrape by]. (DOOK had not appeared in the NYT since the '50s, and has not appeared since that 2014 grid.)

A finger is an arrangement of black squares jutting out from the edge of the grid. Usually fingers are three blocks long, because there's no way to subdivide the third row/column of a puzzle otherwise.

FITB is short for "fill in the blank." Technically all crosswords involve filling in white/blank squares, but FITB is usually used to describe clues which contain a blank whose answer will be a word (or multiple words - see partial) that can fill in that blank, e.g. [___ circus] as a clue for FLEA.

"Green paint" is shorthand for a multi-word entry, usually in the form of ADJECTIVE NOUN, which has no meaning beyond the literal "a NOUN which is ADJECTIVE"; such entries are usually frowned upon in crossword puzzles. For example, RED FLAG could be clued as [Warning sign], and BLACK FLAG could be clued as ["TV Party" band], but you'd be hard-pressed to find a clue for ORANGE FLAG beyond... um... [Thing that waves in the air and is the color between red and yellow]. The term was invented back in 2004 by Patrick Berry, who in his Crossword Constructor's Handbook calls out GREEN PAINT as an example of the sort of technically-a-thing entry lesser constructors might cobble together in a grid, noting that "it's [hard] to conjure up a hypothetical reference work that would bother to list GREEN PAINT." Ironically, several constructors have put GREEN PAINT in puzzles clued in reference to Berry's terminology, meaning the entry GREEN PAINT is not green paint.

The happy pencil (sometimes called "Mr. Happy Pencil") is the unofficial name for the mascot for the free software AcrossLite. When you fill in every square in a puzzle correctly in Across Lite, a pop-up window with the text "CONGRATULATIONS! You have successfully completed this puzzle" and a picture of the "happy pencil"; "got the happy pencil" has since been genericized by solvers to mean "has filled in every square in this puzzle correctly," particularly with online solvers such as PuzzleMe.

A helper square is a nicer term for a cheater square.

A kealoa is a short entry that is usually clued identically to another entry of the same length - so named because if you see the clue [Mauna ___], it's a 50/50 chance to be either KEA or LOA, with no way of telling which it is. The worst offender here is ["Me too!"] which has a four-way split between AS DO I vs AS AM I vs SO AM I vs SO DO I.

A natick is a square in a puzzle where two unfamiliar words - usually (but not always) proper names - cross one another, in such a fashion that if you know neither you would have no way to know the correct answer. The term dates back to Sunday, July 6, 2008, when noted crossword critic/curmudgeon Michael "Rex Parker" Sharp groused on his popular blog about that day's New York Times Sunday puzzle, in which 1-Across was NC WYETH (early 20th century American illustrator, father of Christina's World painter Andrew) and 1-Down was NATICK (a town on the ten-mile mark of the Boston Marathon; population: 37,000). Often used as a verb, e.g., "I naticked at 44-Across."

A nina is a name, word, message, etc. hidden in the answers of a crossword grid. These are much more common in cryptic crosswords than in American-style ones, owing to the malleability of grids with unchecked squares. The term "nina" references caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who would famously hide the name of his daughter Nina in the linework of his cartoons.

A pangram is a crossword where each letter of the alphabet appears at least once in the grid. This is pretty rare in mainstream outlets - there's about one pangram per month in the New York Times. A grid where each letter is used at least twice is called a double pangram; this is markedly rarer in a grid unless you're actively trying for it, but several constructors have pulled it off, including yours truly. Incredibly, several constructors have made triple pangrams, and I am aware of three different quadruple pangrams (two in the NYT and one in, of all places, the Hindu Times - Shrikanth Thirumalaiswami, take a bow!). The only quintuple pangram ever printed in a major outlet was done by David C. Duncan Dekker for the New York Times back in 2016. A sextuple pangram is probably literally impossible.

A partial is a subset of fill-in-the-blanks clue where the blank spans multiple words, e.g. ["There's ___ in team!"] as a clue for NO I, or ["___ Lay Dying"] for AS I. Most publications frown on partials longer than four or five letters.

A pasco is an arrangement of seven black squares in a 2/3/2 pattern - two utahs stuck together. The "pasco" was named after constructor Paolo Pasco by fellow constructor Sid Sivakumar, as a complete joke; Paolo then made a grid with four pascos in it, and the name stuck. As Sid explained it to me: "I think it’s hilarious because in science there is this observation that things are rarely named after the people they’re “supposed” to be named after, and in this case it’s not like anyone is particularly known for using that black square shape."

A rebus square, or just a rebus (sometimes facetiously pluralized as "rebi" or "rebii") is a square in a puzzle which contains more than one letter.

Scrabblef***ing is an R-rated term with two distinct uses. The first is in reference to grids making heavy use of the letters J, Q, X, and/or Z (a.k.a. the "premium" tiles in a Scrabble set), typically with entries like BUZZFEED QUIZ, TJ MAXX, NU-JAZZ, etc. (Trenton Charlson is hands-down the crossworld's premier scrabblef***er.) The second is in reference to puzzles that have inorganically stuck a J/Q/X/Z in their short fill, typically in pursuit of a pangram - e.g., AQI crossing QED rather than ARI crossing RED. This is, IMO, the bad kind of scrabblef***ing, which I discourage people from doing.

A spanner is a single long entry that touches both the left and right edges of the grid (or the top and bottom edge if it's going vertically). Used interchangeably with "15," because that's the standard size for a puzzle.

A stagger stack is a trio of long entries (typically 11 or 13 letters each) which are "stacked" on top of each other between a pair of staircases. These are convenient for constructors in that the first letter of each stacked entry can be the first letter of a different entry going down.

A staircase is an arrangement of six black squares in a 3/2/1 pattern.

A triple stack is a trio of long (8+-letter) entries of the same length which are "stacked" on top of each other. Usually this refers to three spanners stacked at the center of a grid. See also stagger stack, which is slightly different; generally "triple stack" is only used when the first letter of each of the stacked entries are all crossed by the same entry in the other direction.

Unchecked squares - often called unches - are white squares which break a fundamental rule of American-style crosswords, namely, that every white square in a grid must correspond to both an across entry and a down entry. Usually there is some thematic justification for the unches (e.g., in this grid by Ross Trudeau and Soleil Saint-Cyr, the three unches spell out "R.I.P.").

A utah is an arrangement of five black squares in a 3/2 pattern, so named because they resemble the shape of Utah in silhouette. Typically (but not exclusively) used by constructors to accomodate a 13-letter theme entry in a grid while still breaking up the third row/column. Add another square to the long side of the utah and you get a staircase; add two squares to the short side and you get a pasco.