Crossword Puzzle Stats

The New York Times crossword puzzle app doesn't show much you information about your solve times. I learned it's possible to download your own stats (see here) and decided to do my own analysis. The dataset shown on this page includes 1,000 puzzles solved since 2019.

Average time by day of week

The puzzle gets progressively harder as the week goes on, with Saturday being the most challenging day of the week. The Saturday and Sunday puzzles also feature a larger grid of 25x25 squares as compared to a 15x15 weekday puzzle. In the graph above we can see a pretty clear jump from the time it takes to solve Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday puzzles to solving Thursday and beyond.

Puzzles over time

A noticeable uptick in puzzle activity since the onset of the pandemic.

Puzzles by day of week

Breaking out each puzzle by it's day of the week helps to make this chart a bit more understandable. You can see that time to solve increases as the week goes on, as puzzles become more challenging later in the week.

Puzzle constructors

Top 20 crossword puzzle constructors in the dataset. I'm glad Erik Agard is on the list- he's one of my personal favorites. I highly recommend his food-themed puzzle book 🤓