Mark My Words: NYT Sunday Crossword of March 30

March 30, 2025

Here are my notes from solving the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle of March 30, 2025.

This puzzle by Simeon Siegel was titled Mark My Words. The theme involved seven Across clues that resembled Markdown formatting, though knowing Markdown wasn’t required to solve them.

This puzzle gave me some difficulty, but I managed to get a foothold in the bottom rows and solved mostly by working upwards.

The first theme clue I got was [- Peruse -]. With crosses at the end, I could see it ended with LINES, which I managed to extend to THE LINES, and finally—after correcting an incorrect guess of REWIND for [Music player button] to REPEAT— I could see EE in the middle and solved to READ BETWEEN THE LINES.

This unlocked the secret to the theme clues: peruse means read, and appears between two lines. So I was on the lookout for the theme clues to be literal formatting representations of known phrases.

Moving up, the next clue I got was [Alumnus °]. With the degree sign and crosses, I could make out DEGREE at the end, and was on the lookout for something like “person who graduated” for the rest. With some more crosses, I realized POST GRADUATE DEGREE made perfect sense: the degree symbol appears after (post) the alumnus (graduate).

I managed to get the other clues without much difficulty. They are:

• [Feasts - - -]: DINES AND DASHES
• [* Composed *]: WRITTEN IN THE STARS
• [# Believes]: BUYS BY THE POUND, using buy in the sense of “accept the truth of”.
• [… Ancient]: PREHISTORIC PERIODS, which probably cost me the most trouble. It looked like the beginning could be PREVIOUS, and I thought maybe the C could be from BC PERIODS.
• [. [Not this]]: was confusingly meta. It solved to THAT’S BESIDE THE POINT—I guess that is not this.

Here are things I wish to note for future reference.

Healthcare

• A Medicare Advantage Plan, or a Part C, is a plan offered by a company approved by Medicare, the U.S. health insurance program.

Peoples

• The Otoe are a Native American tribe in the Midwestern U.S. I feel like I’ve encountered OTOE as an answer before, but couldn’t remember it for [Tribe headquartered in Red Rock, Okla.] this time.

Places

• Mount Etna is an active volcano in Sicily, Italy. It was the answer to [Big Sicilian smoker].
• Pamana Island, also known as Ndana, is a small uninhabited island of Indonesia. It is considered the southernmost point of Asia.
• Petra in Jordan is a historic city with buildings and rock-cut architecture over 2,000 years old.

Products

• Mighty Patch is a patch for pimples. For [Target for a Mighty Patch], I imagined something about farmland and initially guessed ACRE instead of ACNE.

Tricky clues

• [“Alas…”] was the archaic AH ME.
• For [Group in “a pension fund”], I only got it by crosses until there was just one letter missing. The answer was AEIOU, vowels that appear in that order in the phrase. I have not seen this clue pattern before.
• For [Dollar, informally] and [Canadian dollar, informally], I had not heard of either CLAM or LOONIE, respectively.
• For [Hold together], COHERE was non-obvious.
• [Average killers?] was DEES, I guess because the letter grade D ruins a grade-point average where A+ is the highest. I’m not a fan of answers that treat a single letter as its phonetic spelling, like D becoming DEE.
• [Chess pieces] was MEN, which feels archaic. Most chess players would call them pieces and pawns.
• [Org. whose budget is classified] was THE NSA. I felt including THE was unnecessary and inconsistent with most clues.
• [Something searched for in vein?]: ORE as in an ore vein.

Words

• An auger is a tool resembling a large corkscrew, for boring holes in wood.
• An oriel is a bay window projecting out from a wall. It was the answer to [Architectural projection].
• A sump is a pit serving as a drain or receptacle for liquids, and the answer to [Home drainage option].

Final thoughts

Overall this was a fun puzzle and I feel I had to look up less things than usual. The Markdown-like clues were particularly fun to decode, and I appreciated that the theme could be solved without knowing Markdown—if anything, knowing the syntax might’ve been a distraction.