Numbers Game: NYT Sunday Crossword of April 27
May 6, 2025
Here are my notes from solving the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle of April 27, 2025. The puzzle was created by Jacob Reed and titled Numbers Game.
The theme of the puzzle involved clues written in a digital calculator font that looked like random mathematical expressions at first.
I first understood the theme on 20-Across: [5508.461375/618].
Think back to grade school when you probably made your calculator spell words by putting in numbers and flipping
it upside down. Press this button to flip the clue
upside down. If you treat the non-digit characters as word separators, you’ll
see it translates to [Big sleigh boss]. The answer: SANTA CLAUS.
The others:
- 22-Across: [
0-5.08718] , or [Bilbo’s O](?). I never read Tolkien, but I’ve seen some of the Lord of the Rings films and have some ambient awareness of the plot. With crosses, I could find THE ONE RING. - 43-Across: [
316008+5336338] , or [Beegees boogie]: STAYIN ALIVE. Great. - 45-Across: [
32008-53177187714] , or [Hillbillies booze]. I could not get this one for a while; it ended in NE so I guessed something WINE. The answer: MOONSHINE. - 57-Across: [
607-376006] , or [Google log]: SEARCH HISTORY. - 67-Across: [
3045.1045708] , or [Bolshoi shoe]: BALLET SLIPPER. I did not know what a Bolshoi was; it’s a ballet company, so I had to get this from crosses. - 81-Across: [
57334-4614] , or [High heels]: STILETTOS, which seem to come up in puzzles fairly often. - 84-Across: [
7738.51773+51.345] , or [She is Ellis Bell]: EMILY BRONTE. I didn’t know the BrontΓ«s originally published under pen names, designed to mask their gender, though Ellis Bell sounds somewhat feminine to my modern ear.
The theme clues were not so difficult, but I had trouble filling in the rest of the crossword. Here are some notes.
Arts and culture
- Luca is a 2021 Pixar film.
- Mukbangs are streaming broadcasts of people eating food, from the Korean words for “eating” and “broadcast”.
- Three Sisters is a 1901 Chekhov play about three sisters named Olga, Maria, and Irina Prozorova.
Food
- [Gourmet mushroom type]: MOREL. Morel mushrooms are edible mushrooms with a honeycomb-like cap.
- [Purple yam in Philippine cuisine]: UBE. The yam is called ube ubi or purple yam.
Nature
- A hart is an adult male deer.
People
- Alan Alda is an American actor.
- Tig Notaro is an American comedian, solving [Comedian Notaro]. She appeared in a previous puzzle but I misremembered her name as Tin.
- Iga Swiatek appeared again, and I misremembered the name as Ina, causing much lost time.
Products
- [Adirondack chair part]: SLAT. The Adirondack chair is an outdoor lounge chair with wide armrests and a tall slatted back.
Tricky clues
- [What a hot dog might do]: PANT. I was thinking of the food and a showoff, but not literally a dog on a hot day.
- [Goes to the mat]: WRESTLES. I had WHISTLES in here for a long time until I could correct it.
Words
- [Shepherd’s staff]: CROOK. A shepherd’s crook is a staff with a hook at one end used by shepherds.
Final thoughts
The theme took me back to grade school algebra class where my friends and I would try to make words on our calculators; in that sense it was more nostalgic than clever in an “a-ha!” sense. But it was great fun to program this blog post with the custom calculator font and interactive flipping.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Keshikan for the calculator font DSEG.
Update
I checked an answer key and discovered I made errors in the scanned solve above:
- 52-Down [One of the Marx Brothers]: CHICO not CHICHY. I only knew Groucho when solving the puzzle. The brothers are Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo.
- 73-Across [Sleazeball]: CREEPO not CREEPY (which caused the Y in CHICHY). This looked like the wrong part-of-speech, but I couldn’t think of any other letter to end CREEP_.