Alt text:
Also, we would really appreciate it if you could prominently refer to it as an 'eHit'.
Imma need "xkcd explained" for this one!
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
303 points (95.8% liked)
xkcd
9127 readers
226 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
These are all short words full of the most common letters, so will make designing crosswords easier because they'll be useful "crossers".
But why references to musicians?
These specific musicians are referenced a lot by crosswords. NYT loves them, at least. Very “hip and with it”.
It’s kinda an inside joke, but that’s XKCD for ya.
Thanks, that’s what I needed
I assume it's just an example of how to create new topical words since it's a lot easier to name an album than to get a word well-known enough to be eligible for the dictionary.
The artists all seem to be big names so I assume it's their popularity rather than any history of quirky album names that's decided the list.
I assumed it was because those musicians are popular enough that even if they released songs/albums with the title scheme akin to svnahshfhfbduj people would still buy them and know about them.
Oh, I see! Thanks!
Are we called crossers?
Oh the crossword cross-er. Thought it was a cool new “puzzle head” term I hadn’t heard. Misread. I’m dumb at crosswords too.
Having been doing daily crosswords for a few months, ERAS has come up like, ten times.
I'm having a mental stronk trying to figure out what the words on the bottom say
Crosswords have clues going across and down.
The words just use common letters so they're things puzzle creators wish were real words. They're not currently words.
Ahem:
aerae: Latin, genitive/dative singular of aera
eni: Urhobo for 'elephant'
oreta: Latin, taxonomic genus within the family Drepanidae.
aroe: Rōmaji transcription of アロエ
oine: Danish, indefinite plural of øie
aen: Rōmaji transcription of あえん
enta: French, third-person singular past historic of enter
aete: Rōmaji transcription of あえて
aroe: Rōmaji transcription of アロエ
ok but that's just the Katakana transcription of aloe
ha
Those are all unacceptable crossword clues
Taylor 2025 effort would be an acceptable crossword clue
oine is most definitely not Danish for eyes. That would be øjne, plural of øje.
What does 'enter' even mean in French?
In means nothing. The french for enter is "entrer"
That’s why they use “oboe” so often eh
Or they could push for the sort of crosswords with more black squares (very common here in Britain) that rarely have anything bigger than a 1x1 intersection. There are other ways to challenge the solver.
I only do the cryptics myself - I like that you can be confident you have the right answer without waiting for the crossers to check your guess.