165: Naming the Ferocious Egg (7x No. 3)

Jac
Jan 2
2 min read

Updated: Jan 7

Happy New Year from Trash Panda Puzzles! It’s wild to think we’re already here. It feels like just yesterday I was writing the blurb for crossword 151… wait, seriously? I only made 13 crosswords in 2025?! Yikes. I clearly need to step it up in 2026. Thankfully, I’ve already gotten a head start with this 7x project. Don’t worry though, larger grids will still be in the mix alongside the minis.

With the turn of the year, it also felt like a good moment to take another look at my puzzle stats section and reassess what’s working (and what isn’t). Below this blurb, you’ll find the latest iteration of those stats. Why do I bother tracking all of this? Simple. Early on, I realized that my clue-writing process already made a lot of these numbers easy to compute. That, and I noticed that nobody else was really presenting anything quite like it. So I leaned in.

Here’s a quick refresher on what each line means:

Title Inspiration: I was once heckled by a Twitch streamer who insisted that every crossword should have a title. I took that note to heart and ran with it. Most of my titles are goofy word mashups pulled directly from the clues listed here.
Seed Entries: The word or words I start the grid with. These entries anchor the puzzle and guide where I place black squares and how I build clean crossings.
Personal Word List / Score: Entries here either don’t appear on the common word lists in use today, or I’ve intentionally scored them differently. This list acts as my personal reservoir of seed words and oddities that catch my interest.
Fresh-to-Me Entries (7+): Entries that have never appeared in any crossword I’ve constructed before. To keep this from ballooning out of control, I only include entries that are seven or more letters long.
Unique Entries to Date: Because I track every entry and clue I’ve ever used, I can filter out duplicates and see how large my total unique entry pool has grown.
Repeat Entry Rate: One of the newer additions. This percentage reflects how many entries in the puzzle have appeared in my past work. (And yes, I make a concerted effort not to reuse clues.)
Proper Nouns: Another new category, listing every grid entry that contains a proper noun. Of all the recent changes, this is the one I’m least certain will stick.
Non-NYT Entries: Last but not least, these are entries that have never appeared in a published New York Times crossword. I would love to expand this category to all major US newspapers, but I only have reliable statistics about the New York Times.