Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “In a manner of speaking”
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.
5 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.
One of the first words anyone reaches for when thinking about how people talk, and its letters sit comfortably in a grid. It feels like a sure thing without being one.
Short, common, and squarely inside the everyday vocabulary of informal speech, so it is an obvious early guess that the grid never rewards.
A rarer, more literary cousin of the plain speech words; dredging it up feels clever, but it is still a decoy rather than a find.
A double-duty word for a body part and a way with words, which makes it sound like it belongs here even when it does not.
a textbook decoy
At 5.0 this is fair but not free: the clue hands over the category almost immediately, so the real labor is dredging up five exact synonyms before the grid runs dry. LINGO is likely the first catch — short, common, and easy to stumble into — and it opens the floodgates, because DIALECT, JARGON, PARLANCE and VERNACULAR are all the same kind of noun, so the eye stops reading for meaning and starts scanning for speech-shaped letter clusters. VERNACULAR is the long pole at ten letters; it soaks up a lot of the board, and the remaining short entries tend to snap into place around it. TURNOFPHRASE is the quiet giveaway the clue was pointing at, and its three-word shape traces cleanly across opposite edges once you commit to it. What makes the set trickier than it looks is that all five words are near-synonyms with no natural hierarchy, so progress comes in lumps rather than a straight line.
"In a manner of speaking" is a lovely double agent of a clue: read one way it is a shrug — "sort of, in a sense" — but read literally it is the theme itself, because every answer names a manner of speaking. It also quietly seeds the spangram: TURNOFPHRASE is exactly the kind of expression the clue is doing double duty as. The wink is that the phrase sounds throwaway, yet it turns out to be the most literal instruction on the board.
The editor's angle is telling: five near-synonyms, with every adjacent idea — accent, slang, argot, idiom — left off the board. DIALECT, JARGON, LINGO, PARLANCE and VERNACULAR all describe speech shared by a group, yet each slices it differently: by region, trade, casualness, formality, nativity. With no proper nouns or place names to anchor on, the set feels elegant, even cruel: five words that could almost swap places. TURNOFPHRASE then zooms out a level, naming the crafted expression rather than the collective habit.
