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LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “Spell Cheque”
Instructions: This week’s contest answer is the letter that goes in the circled square.
Answer: E
Maybe my favorite Week 1 of the entire series, and certainly in the top 5. Happy with not only the puzzle itself but also with the decision to run it Week 1 instead of Week 2, which turned out to be correct (and may seem obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t obvious at the time!).
I’d noticed a while back that if you had four words intersecting in the bottom-right corner of a grid that were each spelled -RE or -ER depending on your U.K.- or U.S.-ness, you’d have an ambiguous four-square box in that corner. Solvers got a nudge in that direction since each clue was tagged with a city name (Cambridge, Birmingham, Reading, Manchester) from both countries and the parenthetical question “But which one?”
So, how to disambiguate? REPEATED ENTRIES elsewhere in the grid, ruling out one of the spellings. It all worked out with symmetrically placed SPECT(ER/RE) and SAB(ER/RE) in the northwest and southeast, and ONELIT(ER/RE) and SOMB(ER/RE) in the southeast. Can’t have two SPECTERs and SABERS, so it had to be SPECTRE and SABRE and thus ONELITER and SOMBER down there, making our contest answer that circled letter E (as in England).
Magoo writes (from England):
Nice to see “my” spellings appearing, though it’s a manoeuvre that might be fuelling offence.
Joanna C. writes (from Australia):
Yay, finally some words that are spelled right! 😉
makfan writes:
I’m solving from Canada this week so I’m already struggling to spell correctly.
And Kettlebadger says:
Notably the buyer of Dunder Mifflin in season 6.
Oh yes, the “SABRE song” — that was a good one. Employees didn’t know how to pronounce the name of the company’s new buyer so their song about it didn’t turn out well.
https://youtu.be/BoT-6Z597Tc
This week’s winner, whose name was chosen at random from the 625 correct entries received, is Brendan W. Sullivan of Cambridge, Mass. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil, and notepad set, Brendan will also receive a signed copy of my book Fast & Fun Mini Crosswords.
OK, I just now realized how fitting it is that this week’s winner is from Cambridge…
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a food that’s four letters long in English.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.