LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Two-Way Communication”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a U.S. city that appears frequently in crossword grids.
Answer: TOLEDO, Ohio, found by 316 solvers, of which 221 were solo solves

Step one last week: notice that our five theme entries shared a commonality. They were:

17-A: [Word in the lyrics to “Jingle Bells”] = SLEIGHING
25-A: [Indie band that sings “Normal Person”] = ARCADE FIRE
40-A: [Qualifying phrase] = IF I’M NOT MISTAKEN
50-A: [Sports Illustrated’s 2017 Sportsperson of the Year] = JOSE ALTUVE
63-A: [Entree on the Chesapeake Bay] = CRABCAKES

The commonality? Each of these entries conceals a three-letter alphabetical string:

SLEIGHING
ARCADEFIRE
IFIMNOTMISTAKEN
JOSEALTUVE
CRABCAKES

Now what? Well, why those strings? We have ABC, DEF, GHI…but then we skip JKL, then pick up with MNO, then skip PQRS to get to TUV. Why skip any trigrams, and why skip four letters with PQRS?

Answer: because these are the letters on each button of a phone. Aha! so JKL would’ve been tough to find a fit for, and PQRS is too long and consonanty to be useful. So now what?

Well, let’s see what numbers these yield, which might be important since we notice they’re not in numerical order:

GHI = 4
DEF = 2
MNO = 6
TUV = 8
ABC = 1

So we’ve got 42681 and we’re looking for a U.S. city, which might lead you to think zip codes. Pop 42681 into the Goog and you’ll be shown the city of TOLEDO, Ohio, our meta answer and a familiar entry in crosswords due to its six common letters + alternative consonant + vowel pattern.

316 solvers found it, just right for a Week 3 of 5, though there were some criticisms. A number of solvers hesitated even after seeing TOLEDO come up, since they wondered if it appeared “frequently” enough in crosswords to count. We’ve all seen it, but it’s no AMES or ERIE. Still, I don’t believe anyone found TOLEDO and didn’t submit it because it wasn’t “frequently” found enough, though it did cause some long, irritated pauses before submitting.

Some others (including joon) found the second step underclued. There are a lot of things you can do with five numbers, but I thought that looking for a U.S. city and you’ve got five digits would lead to zip codes pretty quickly, but there are a lot of things five numbers could mean so some thought that step needed another nudge.

GUEST CONSTRUCTOR PUZZLE:

Today’s meta is by Nam Jin Yoon, who is a law librarian living in New York. This is his second meta. He enjoys reading Asian-American and Latin American literature, and is a Canadian who’s originally from Toronto.

One more note before we start:

HINTS: We will be sending out three hints for this meta: one each at noon ET on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday (contest deadline is Wednesday at noon due to the delayed post). You may use or ignore the hints as you prefer. Full meta-credit for using the hints or not.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This puzzle’s contest answer is a loanword for which the stress falls on the second syllable.

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.