Pondering the Legacy of Puzzle-Friendly Names

Posted on August 18, 2026 by gmdirect

There was an internet hoax last week that reported Liv Ullmann had passed away.

(And yes, I am retroactively editing this post to correct it, since I had been duped by this hoax. Thank you to one of my commenters for correcting me!)

An actress, filmmaker, and representative of UNICEF, her work has graced both stage and screen, and she was an integral part of Ingmar Bergman’s equally legendary career.

But she has had a similarly lengthy tenure as a crossword entry. Her name dominated crossword cluing for LIV for decades (save for Roman numeral clues), eventually being usurped by LIV Tyler in the 21st century.

And, to be completely honest, I didn’t know Liv Ullmann or her work until I got into puzzles.

Despite a heavy movie buff phase in my twenties — watching the AFI 100, doing a deep dive into Oscar-winning films across film history — there were many Hollywood names I didn’t learn about until I started working in puzzles.

I mean, sure, I knew ASTA from The Thin Man movies, and as a horror movie fan, LON Cheney was a household name, but ONA Munson, OSA Massen, UNA Merkel? UTA Hagen, POLA Negri, EMIL Jannings? A total mystery to me, one and all.

Some names are more accessible than others. RIP TORN, for instance, who I know better from Men in Black and Dodgeball (and The Larry Sanders Show) than from The Man Who Fell to Earth or Cross Creek.

But it’s curious to look across the history of crosswords and crosswordese and see names fall in and out of favor, which names linger despite their increasing irrelevance, and which other ones come back unexpectedly.

I mean, OONA Chaplin is helping OONA’s cause a bit, and ANA de Armas has breathed new life into that three-letter combo. Director ARI Aster is helping ease cluing reliance on a certain Onassis ex. I wish more people knew about the movie Pearl, if only for a new clue for THEDA.

ELSA and OLAF will be riding the Frozen train for years to come. ISSA RAE (and RAE Sremmurd to a lesser extent) have shaken RAE free from Norma, Charlotte, and Ms. Dawn Chong.

But ENA? ELKE? ILKA? Those feel unlikely to make a comeback.

And the cycle continues. INDE Navarrette’s star is on the rise after Obsession, but will she have legs as a crossword entry? The next few years will be telling.

It’s hard to know what name will be a grid-fill flash-in-the-pan and which will have crossword longevity.

I’ve thought about this a lot.

In fact, inspired by the curious connection between crosswords and Hollywood, I have an ever-evolving crosswordese movie list that I use as inspiration for random movie nights:

Casablanca (1942, ILSA and LORRE).
The Night of the Hunter (1955, screenplay by James AGEE)
The Maltese Falcon (1931, UNA Merkel, a full decade before the Bogart one!)
The Cheaters (1945, ONA Munson)
The Good Earth (1937, O-LAN played by LUISE RAINER, also starring Paul MUNI)
Bus Stop (1956, based on the play by William INGE)
The Owl and the Pussycat (1970, George SEGAL)
Rocketship X-M (1950, OSA Massen)
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964, PIA Zadora)
Beautiful Girls (1996, MIRA Sorvino)
V for Vendetta (2005, REA)
IT’S A Gift (1934)
Letters from IWO Jima (2006)
NEVER ON Sunday (1960)
Stanley & IRIS (1990)
Bird ON A Wire (1990)
Heidi (1937 or 1968, ALP)

And then you can close out any proper crosswordese movie marathon with films featuring UMA Thurman, EWAN McGregor, or CARY Grant you like, or even The King and I with YUL Brynner.

As these legends (and not-quite-legends) of the silver screen continue to depart this mortal coil (or at least, as internet hoaxes about their deaths continue to circulate), I can’t help but reflect on their curious second life as grid fill.

How many awesome, clever, immensely satisfying solves have we enjoyed in part because of the convenient letter combinations in these names? How many times have they bailed constructors out of bad corners or linguistic jams caused by a particularly taxing theme or grid gimmick?

Probably more often than you’d think.

We may not always know their movies or their most quotable lines, but we definitely know how to spell their names and fill in those blanks.

What names do you only know from crosswords, fellow reader? Do you have any suggestions for my Crosswordese Viewing List? Let me know in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you!

The Fun Side of Crosswordese

Posted on July 28, 2020 by gmdirect

Anyone who solves crosswords is familiar with some aspect of crosswordese, even if they don’t know it by that name. Crosswordese consists of words that appear frequently in puzzles, but not nearly as often in conversation or common use. My favorite variation on that definition is “words that crop up a lot in grids but are otherwise pretty useless.”

Part of becoming a better solver is building a personal lexicon of crosswordese and common crossword words so you’re not getting tripped up by the same obscurities, peculiarities, and cruciverbalist celebrities that so often occupy those black-and-white grids we enjoy.

Some of these words seem destined to remain obscure. ETUI will most likely never become commonplace. Most people don’t fence, and couldn’t tell an EPEE from a foil or a saber.

[Image courtesy of Celebs.Infoseemedia.com.]

Others are cyclical. OONA was Chaplin’s wife, until her granddaughter of the same name become a featured player in the first few seasons of Game of Thrones. Similarly, both ELSAS Lancaster and the movie feline have Frozen to thank for that name gaining new life in puzzles these days.

(Here’s hoping there’s a crop of Eastern-European actresses that will storm TV and film soon and breathe new life into clues for ONA, UNA, UTA, and OSA.)

But, for the most part, crosswordese evokes negative feelings. It’s easy to come up with a list of the words that irk us — the ones we’ve never encountered in the real world, or the ones that we simply cannot remember, even after filling them into a dozen grids or more.

But today I’d like to focus on the ones I do enjoy, the strange words I’ve learned through crossword solving and construction that have broadened my vocabulary and sent my mind down unexpected tangents and pathways I would’ve never otherwise wandered through.

[Image courtesy of Driving.ca.]

EDSEL

It’s amazing how a convenient letter pattern can keep an infamous failure in the minds of solvers decades and decades later. It was only manufactured for two years, and that was SIXTY years ago. And yet, whenever I see “Ford flop” or something similar as a clue, I always smile. It’s universal at this point.

NE’ER

There’s a lot of poetic license — see what I did there? — taken with poetry terms in crosswords, and most of them are well-and-truly overused. But for some reason, NEER ne’er bothers me. In fact, I enjoy seeing it. It probably has to do with “ne’er-do-well,” which is an incredibly fun term to throw around. It’s right up there with “deipnosophist” and “raconteur” as far as descriptive terms that need to make a comeback.

[Image courtesy of Digital Spy.]

IAGO

He was first clued as a master manipulator from the works of Shakespeare, then as a conniving Disney sidekick who slowly turns toward the light over the course of the franchise. In either case, he’s a fascinating character whose handy combination of vowels ensures he’ll be a part of crosswords for years to come.

[Images courtesy of StarWars.com and Polina Couture.]

OBI

As someone who is both a Star Wars fan and deeply interested in Japanese culture, I always enjoy when OBI makes an appearance in a grid. (More for the former reasons than the latter, if I’m being honest.)

In fact, this blog entry inspired me to search XWordInfo to see when OBI started being clued as part of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s name (twice, which is weird yet lyrical) and not just as a Japanese sash.

Although the character debuted in the first Star Wars film in 1977, his name wasn’t used in The New York Times crossword to clue OBI until 1990!

These are just the first common crossword entries that came to mind. There are a few others, not to mention all of the neat animals — mostly bird-related or African in origin — that crop up in crosswords. KEA and ROC, IBEX and ELAND, OKAPI and RATEL, just to name a few.

But now I turn the subject over to you, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers. What are your favorite common crossword words or bits of crosswordese that appear in grids but don’t irk you? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Celebrity View a Clue edition!

Posted on November 27, 2015 by gmdirect

Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’m posting the answers to last week’s View a Clue Celebrity game!

I selected ten names that commonly show up in crossword grids to see if the PuzzleNation audience could identify them from pictures. So let’s see how you did!

#1 (7 letters)