Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “Not a good sign”
A gentle direction — no specifics.
Closer — the category is coming into focus.
Near-direct — only read if you’re stuck.
Direction only.
Getting closer.
Near-direct.
6 theme words — lengths in random order
Spaces not counted in total
All theme words — shuffled
These words fit the theme on the surface, but aren’t part of today’s solution. Knowing them ahead of time can save you minutes of searching.
The first superstition most people reach for, which makes it an almost irresistible false lead in a grid like this.
It carries exactly the right ominous charge, but it describes something deliberately cast rather than an everyday accident.
It's the most literal reading of the clue itself, which is precisely the hook — the puzzle stays far more concrete than this.
a textbook decoy
The 5.2 comes from the pairing twist: the clue sounds like a single omen, so you hunt for one ominous word and keep bumping into halves instead. SALT is the unlock — four letters, easy to trace — and the instant it clicks with SPILLED the grid stops being a word search and becomes a matching game, because BROKEN suddenly wants MIRROR and THIRTEENTH suddenly wants FLOOR. ROTTENLUCK at ten letters is long enough that it rarely surfaces by accident; you almost have to be looking for it, and most solvers will see it only once the three pairs have lined up in their heads. What makes this set harder than it looks is that no single word carries the theme — MIRROR and FLOOR are perfectly neutral alone, so the category only snaps into focus retroactively.
The clue is a pun doing double duty. Read literally, "not a good sign" is a wry verdict on something going wrong; read through folklore, it's a straight definition of a bad omen — the very thing the grid collects. It never says the word, which is why it stays slippery so long, but the whole set (broken mirror, spilled salt, thirteenth floor) plus the spangram ROTTENLUCK restates that same idea three ways. Publishing it on Friday the 13th, no less, seals the joke.
Plenty of words could evoke superstition, but this grid refuses the obvious ones — no cats, no ladders. Instead the editor took three familiar phrases, split each down the middle and scattered the halves, so BROKEN, MIRROR, SPILLED, SALT, THIRTEENTH and FLOOR are all individually inert. Reassembling them is the actual puzzle, and ROTTENLUCK hovers above the exercise as its one-word thesis. The elegance is that none of these is a bad sign until two of them touch.
