This is a place to learn about the Muggles community and some of the terminology we use. It also contains suggested strategies for solving meta crosswords, as well as a repository of all past WSJ crossword contests and solutions.
WHAT A CHARACTER — FIVE-K, 5K, 20K, 21K, HALF-MARATHON — MATT GAFFNEY
MikeMillerwsj wrote: ↑Tue Nov 22, 2022 9:51 am
A lot going on this week!
We had a big turnout, and lots of discussion about alternative answers. Most of you on this board know the whole story now, but here's the official solution we printed:
The contest answer is a FIVE-K. Each of the four long theme entries contains five K’s, suggesting the answer.
But... lots of solvers pointed out that the Ks in the four theme entries add up to 20K, which is a kind of race too. Others pointed out that there was a 21st K in the grid, and that 21K races are commonly known as half marathons. We agree those are both legitimate and acceptable answers. You can read a nice post from Matt about all this on this discussion board here viewtopic.php?p=112562#p112562.
For the record, we had 3,125 entries this week, a huge number for us. 1,645 for 5K, 346 for HALF MARATHON, and 269 for 20K. (Those are big numbers for alternative answers.)
Thanks to everyone here for riding out our technical problems and thanks to Matt and Mike for generously seeing alternative answers. Great artists are always open to interpretations they never had in mind when they wrote their novel or painted their picture. And congrats to this week's randomly selected winner (who submitted 20K): Bruce Cranna of Needham, MA!