Wednesday, October 7, 2026 — In the Great ROTI v. NAAN Contest, ROTI Scores Again!!

Listeners may recall that the appearance of ROTI or NAAN in the grid immediately drives us to xwordinfo.com to check out the number of times each has appeared in a crossword. As a consequence of today's fine puzzle , ROTI is up by one, so ... yay, ROTI! 😀 We consider ourselves to be up by much more than that, for this was a wonderful Wednesday crossword with some sharp cluing. A few entries that stood out were: 18A, Well-manored men?, EARLS (ha!); the debut 3D, Sly reply to "You can't possibly know that!", OHBUTIDO (uh, oh!); and the very LOL 14A, LOL lite, HEH (Heh!). There are more great clues (of course!), and we explore a fair number of them in today's episode. Kudos to Ben Zimmer for this fine midweek puzzle. Show note imagery: It's T. Rex's great, great, great, great, great, great, great granddaughter, still ticked after not getting a callback for Jurassic World 7 😀 We love feedback! Send us a text... Contact Info: We love listener mail! Drop us a line, crosswordpodcast@icloud.com. Also, we're on FaceBook , so feel free to drop by there and strike up a conversation!