My Lipogrammatic Limitations

A clash of themes.

I’m far from the first to pursue some kind of lipogram achievement in crosswords. Other crosswords have gone e-less, sometimes with just the grid, and sometimes the grid and clues. The LA Times published one such crossword in 2011, The Hindu another in 2013, andThe Guardian another in 2019.

The New York Times, pushing things further, has published crosswords in which E was the only vowel…as well as with only A, with only O, and with only I. Their most recent entry in this monovocalic madness also excludes any entries that have no vowels at all. “Y” may be a sometime consonant, but it usually gets left out of these one-vowel puzzles too. (Grid images by XWordInfo.)

Vowel control isn’t the only kind of lipogram that counts. The NYT has also published a few crosswords with constrained overall letter-counts, the two most impressive by Bruce Haight. Below is the most lipogrammatic puzzle seen in a mainstream publication. It’s made up of only seven letters, all of which are found in its four longest across entries (REALIST, A-LISTER, RETAILS, SALTIER).

I knew this was more than I could handle at the Ubercross scale, but I figured if Haight could do this, then maybe a simply e-less grid wouldn’t be totally out of my reach.

But there was a problem…

At the macro level, I’d already decided that each part of the Ubercross Abecedaria would have a few “What the [letter] stands for, in ___” clues (as in “What the E stands for, in physics”). So I had to use e’s for those.

Plus, there was the fact that each part of the puzzle, up to this point, had included entries that were unusually heavy in the use of its trademark letter. I just thought there was something EFFERVESCENT about that PRECEDENT, and that a little PERSEVERENCE might maintain THE THEME’S INTERDEPEDENCE. (Not saying I used those words exactly, but the point’s made.)

So I had a macro-theme already going that was completely at odds with the micro-theme I wanted. What to do?

Well, why not give up?

I could have instead done something with exaggeration, swapping out words in well-known phrases to get stuff like ENORMOUS DIPPER or MAKE MICROSCOPIC TALK. I could’ve explored the many euphemisms we use in English, or “emotional expressions” like MAD MAGAZINE (it’s a phrase with an emotion in it, right?). Or maybe even done something with the early English words we still use today.

But none of that motivated me like the lipogram did. And I soon hit on a simpler answer.

What you see above is a fuzzed-out version of the grid’s answers, with every letter “E” shown in yellow. E’s get to thrive outside the giant E, but they remain forbidden inside its border. The big E represents a total of 8,473 squares, a little more than half (54.2%) of the 15,625 squares in the total grid.

Tomorrow: A new Ubercross release!

The Day After: How did I keep all them e’s out of there, anyway?