Getting Through The LA Times Crossword Without Losing Your Mind
The Los Angeles Times crossword is published daily by Mike Shenk and his team. It sits somewhere between the easy New York Times Monday and the brutal Saturday Sunday puzzle. The clues lean cultural, slightly obscure, and occasionally mean. You finish one and feel good until you glance at the unchecked boxes. Here is how I actually approach solving these, and where people get stuck. Start with the short clues. Not the one-letter ones necessarily, but the three and four letter entries. Crossword constructors need fillers like ERA, ORE, AHA, EWE, ANTE, IN ATOP, SO SA. These are bread and butter. Nail those first and the grid opens up. I spent years looking at the big impressive clues first, then got nowhere. Swapping that order cut my solve time from 35 minutes down to about 18 on an average day.
The LA Times loves pop culture references and brand names more than the NYT does. If you see a clue like "Streaming service with The Crown," do not overthink it. It is NETFLIX. The puzzle will rarely punish you for a straightforward pop culture fill. It is the ones that seem straightforward that are actually traps. Here is the thing most solvers miss: check your crosses before committing. Writing in a long answer without confirming the intersecting letters is the fastest way to blow up a puzzle. I once filled in ELEANOR for "First lady Roosevelt" without checking the crossing RAY for "Sun ___." That forced me to pull every single answer around it. Took me another 12 minutes to backtrack and fix the damage. The workaround is simple. Never enter a six-letter word until at least two of its crossings are locked in. When you hit a wall and genuinely cannot recall an answer, that is when you use answer lookups. There are several sites that publish the LA Times crossword answers daily. The process is mechanical. You go to the site, enter today's date, and the full grid comes up. It takes about 30 seconds. This is not cheating, it is learning. You will remember ELATH if you see it in context, or you will not, and that is fine.
One edge case that drove me crazy for months: the LA Times sometimes uses British spellings or names that do not appear in American dictionaries. I was stuck on a clue for about eight minutes because I kept writing AMOUR for a French-themed entry when the crossing letters demanded AMOR. The puzzle expected the Spanish or Portuguese form. I finally pulled the answer, noted the pattern, and since then I flag any clue that feels like it should be a well-known foreign word but resists. I check whether the constructor might be pulling from an non-English source before going down a rabbit hole. Another counter-intuitive insight: the diagonal answers in the LA Times are often just as fillery as the rest of the grid. They are not secretly the clever theme answer unless the puzzle is themed. Do not assume every diagonal entry requires special attention. Most of the time they are just fill that connects two crossing words. There is a real downside to relying on answer lookup sites too much. Your solve becomes passive. You read the answers instead of earning them, and your brain stops building the retrieval pathways that make crosswords valuable in the first place. If you use lookups, do it after you have exhausted your own effort. Sit on a stubborn clue for at least five minutes before giving in. That friction is where the learning happens.
Get the Full Details
Also worth knowing: the LA Times archive goes back decades. If you want to practice on easier puzzles, search for Monday through Wednesday editions from the past year. They are noticeably gentler. The Saturday puzzles are where constructors test you. Don't jump straight to Saturday expecting to finish in under 20 minutes. Even experienced solvers hit 40 minutes on a hard Saturday. Some popular sites for checking answers include the LA Times Crossword blog itself, plus aggregator sites like CrosswordTracker or Crossword Nerd. None of them require payment for basic answer lookups. Just search for the date and you will find it. The real skill here is not knowing a bunch of trivia. It is pattern recognition. You start seeing the same fill patterns across puzzles. OREGANO shows up because it fits weird crossing letters. SO FAR, ALL IN, BY AND LARGE. These multi-word fills appear more often in the LA Times than in the NYT. Train for them and you will save yourself half an hour on a tough puzzle.
