New Three-Letter Answers (4 of 4)
The start of a sometimes lengthy, not always successful journey.
In the last week in this space, I’ve discussed three-letter answers that I’ve added to my personal puzzle-making database. I’ve sometimes called these answers “words,” though many of them are actually fragments, names, two-word constructions, or initialisms.
Here’s the list I cited. Though I’ve added a few others besides these, they’re the ones I find most interesting:
AMV - An F - An H - An X - ASD - AXS - BDE - BSB - Buh - BUP - CBT - CTs - CVC - CVV - ENM - ESH - gpd - gph - gpm - hyd - K-Ci - -kun - MFW - Mhm - Nuh - NGL - Nio - NIV - NPC - PvE - Qiu - qq.v. - RDJ - SFX - SJW - “Urp!” - VFX - WFH - wyd - XXS - Yuh - Zan
Explanations for these entries are linked here, here, and here.
(Oops! I slipped “wyd” (“What you doing?”) in there as a counterpoint to “hyd” (“How you doing?”) both from the world of textspeak that I inhabit often, though usually just with my wife these days. See, you’ve got to pay attention!)
All in all, I’m prepared to defend these—I think they’re sufficiently “in the language” to justify their inclusion. In some cases, related answers like PVP and TFW already appear in Matt Ginsberg’s Clue Database - my primary source for what’s already appeared in puzzles.
However, I defend these answers at my own risk…and if you adopt them for your use, you do so at yours.
Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword, wrote in to express his reservations, especially about the initialisms/acronyms in the list above:
At the Times, I have a low tolerance for initialisms that many solvers might not know. It's no fun for someone to get an answer from the crossings and go “huh?”
With a regular word that a solver doesn't know, at least they can make an intelligent guess based on what's pronounceable. With an initialism—where a letter can be absolutely anything—that isn't the case.
For these reasons, new initialisms should be used with care. Most of the ones you've listed so far [up to “MFW”] would be puzzle-killers for me.
As I’d expect of Will, this is a helpful message with its priorities in order. It’s very seductive to treat puzzlemaking as a venue for our own cleverness, but all the “cleverness” in the world doesn’t mean boo if it leaves the solver confused and frustrated. It is also useful advice for anyone who wants their own work accepted by the NYT—and to some degree, even beyond it.
Will personally and the NYT more generally are thought leaders in crosswords. They’ve done more to influence the scene than anyone else. If I were to compose a puzzle for the New York Times’ consideration—as I have done in the past and may do again in the near future—I’d be as careful as I could be about my word choices, and not just with initialisms. And the same goes for the venues following its example.
However…the words “initialisms should be used with care” are not a blanket ban. The NYT has never forbidden all initialisms from use (see “FBI,” “NASA”), and the list of accepted ones changes over time. The paper used to be leery of the initialism “iOS,” Apple products’ operating system. That string of letters had appeared before, but only as “Ios,” a Greek island, or the plural of “Io” moths. But after 2012, NYT policy shifted, as you can see in the XWordInfo listings below.
As you can see, iOS displaced the island Ios more and more. An iOS entry has already appeared in 2024, and 2018 is as recent as Ios gets. (The moths stopped showing up in 2012.)
And while the NYT is a leader in the scene, no publication can be the whole scene. Different puzzles cultivate different audiences, with different demands. As far back as 2009, Brendan Emmett Quigley was using internet initialisms in his online work, sometimes even as themes. The brashness of STFU (“Shut the f$%# up!”) attracted him early:
Brendan liked the idea of using his own space to do the themes he couldn’t do at other publications. Some strings begin their journey to “puzzle acceptability” when some scrappy indie puzzlemaker shares them with their scrappy indie audience.
Others don’t necessarily complete that journey. Unlike “iOS,” “STFU” feels kind of dated as internet slang today, while a perennial like “LOL” has earned a place in almost every crossword-maker’s vocabulary. But I remember when “LOL” was an unfamiliar novelty, too…at least if you weren’t “extremely online.”
A couple of years ago, the NYT even featured WTF, albeit as the name of a podcast. That’s one I would’ve expected to be a puzzle-killer, and maybe a few years earlier, it would’ve been.
Darryl Francis, a frequent contributor to The Journal of Wordplay and Word Ways, wrote in to discuss a few of these words within the larger context of the whole English language. Because even the broadest possible standards of “crossword-friendly” English are only a subset of the whole. There will always be words that no crossword audience would know, or even care to learn, that are still valid vocabulary in other contexts.
Just scanning the third of your four items about New Three-Letter Words. I see that four of them are nio, niv, urp and zan. I reckon that almost any three-letter sequence containing at least one vowel probably exists somewhere as a word already, particularly if the middle letter is a vowel.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has the following entry for nio, with illustrative quotes for this spelling from the late 19th century:
A New Zealand evergreen shrub or small tree, Myoporum laetum (family Myoporaceae), bearing clusters of white flowers and yielding a light white…
The OED has these definitions for niv:
a variant of nib, the tapered part or point of a pen;
a variant of nieve, a clenched hand, a fist.
And the OED also has NIV as New International Version (of the Bible), first published in 1978 (which you mentioned).
Merriam-Webster's 2014 and 2019 editions of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (5th and 6th editions) list urp as a verb, meaning 'to vomit', so also allowing urps, urped and urping as valid Scrabble words. The online Collins dictionary also lists urp, but only as an interjection (www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/urp).
zan appears in several illustrative quotes in the OED. It appears in this children's counting rhyme, dating back to 1810:
One-ery, two-ery, Ziccary zan; Hollow bone, crack a bone, Ninery ten:..Stick, stock, stone dead, Blind man can't see, Every knave, will have a slave, You or I must be He.
zan also appears in this OED 1905 quote as a spelling of 'than':
But muvver's nicer zan 'em all, She calls you ‘precious lamb’, An' let's you roll your ten-pin ball.
And Zan appears as the proper name of an ethnic group - it appears in this OED 1972 quote:
The Kartvelian (Iverian) or South Caucasian group consists of Kartli, Iverian, Zan, Migrel, Laz and Svan.
Of course, the definitions here are probably too obscure to feature in crosswords, but it just goes to show that many three-letter strings have previously been referenced somewhere.
So to sum up a bit, here’s a wildly simplified Venn diagram. The vocabulary that the NYT will accept is in the center-ish ring. Further out are established publications in general. (Just imagine the yellow zone as occupied by other rings for USA Today, The Atlantic, et cetera, that mostly but not entirely overlap the NYT.)
The green (and non-yellow) zone is for those scrappy indie projects (like anything with an “Ubercross” in its name). Beyond that is the zone of all accepted words that English-speakers might use, even those adopted from other languages. And in the dark outer border, there’s utter nonsense like “sgelmcgaljgoapxxxz.” (“It looks like an avocado on a plate,” Janice notes. “Or maybe I’m just hungry.”)
Any movements into the yellow and orange zones are not my decisions to make. But I feel like it’s time to move, say, “NGL” from the white zone to the green zone. This isn’t because I think “NGL” is pretty. It’s because I feel like online crossword solvers are likely to know what it means and appreciate its inclusion—to see, in some sense, themselves reflected back in it. And ditto for the others on this list, not gonna lie.
Am I wrong about this? It’s possible. My next move will be to take these words before Crossword Discord and consult their advice. That discussion group tends to be hard on proposed new entries in my observation, so I won’t be too surprised if they say no to many of these. Perhaps I’ll change my own mind about some or even most of them as time rolls on.
But it’s still worth exploring. That exploration has always drawn me in, and it’s why I try out new forms like the Ubercross and microsses, just as I’ve tried out new forms of comics and literature. Language, and puzzle language, is ever-changing. We need to look at it with fresh eyes every so often, if we want to appreciate it for all it can be.
Phew! This one ran late and long. Tomorrow: Something light!
Some of these are really good. Some of them... perhaps not so much. (CVC and CVV invoked in me the animal venom I see whenever a Roman numeral comes up in a grid.) Luckily when I open up QVWORDLISTMERGED2023.dict in a text editor the three-letter entries I personally added pop up at the very top of the list. I have a couple of these on here (K-Ci, SFX/VFX...) but a couple others (that haven't been in mainstream puzzles as of when I last updated the Ginsberg clue database) on my wordlist I think could maybe cross the threshold:
AJJ/AJR - two very, *very* different rock trios. AJR had a bunch of mainstream hits; AJJ (nee Andrew Jackson Jihad - yikes!) perhaps are a bit too niche for mainstream publications.
DFW - *double* evocative meaning here, standing for both Dallas-Fort Worth (the metro area and the airport) AND po-mo lit-bro fave David Foster Wallace.
HMU - short for "hit me up." A few years ago ago I asked David Steinberg if he'd be game with HMU in a Universal puzzle, and he said yes - seems to have legs!
KBJ - fully expect given the political bent of most publications that there will be Justice in the world this year - finally, a new answer for [Sotomayor's benchmate].
NHK - this is one I was shocked to see wasn't on my wordlist - Japan's national broadcaster I would like to think is pretty famous.
OZU - Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Story" routinely ends up on lists of the best films ever made, and his vowel-Scrabbly-consonant-vowel name is pure crossword bait. Maybe I'll be the one to debut this guy?
PNW - very common initialism for the Pacific Northwest.
TCG - I'd like to think that the huge surge of interest in Pokemon cards in the past few years will make "trading card game" crossworthy - honestly, this is one I'm surprised hasn't shown up in puzzles before, given how old trading card games are as a genre at this point.
WIX - One of the big players in the website maker space - perhaps this'll show up at some point?
ZAN ZEN - religion practiced by members of the Zan ethnic group,denizens
who refuse to use danzen or denizen to relieve pain. qq.v. Phillips'
Artificial Reference. (PAR, for crossword fans)