Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “ Quite the crush”
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.
A shaky, involuntary response reads as perfectly on-theme, and this word threads neatly through a 6x8 grid. Plenty of solvers trace it before anything else.
Speech that trips over itself feels like exactly the kind of detail this clue is chasing, which makes it a very convincing decoy rather than an answer.
Dramatic, romantic and unmistakably emotional — it looks like it belongs from the first read and soaks up a lot of tracing time before solvers move on.
a textbook decoy
The clue's pun does most of the lifting, so the rating lands mid-range rather than high: once you spot BLUSH, the shortest and most obvious entry, the theme snaps into focus and everything else starts to click. GIGGLE and BABBLE come next — exactly what you'd expect from someone trying and failing to play it cool — and FIDGET and STUMBLE confirm the pattern of involuntary, faintly humiliating tells. PERSPIRE is the one that makes you work, because solvers scan for a shorter, more casual word long before the formal one surfaces. FALLINLOVE becomes guessable as soon as a couple of words are locked, but tracing its ten letters across the board is a satisfying last move, and the doubled L near the middle keeps it from being trivial. What makes the set trickier than it looks is that there are no nouns at all — nothing to point at, only behaviors.
'Quite the crush' is doing double duty — it's the feeling itself and the way it flattens you, all at once. The word 'quite' is the giveaway that the editor is being playful: it sounds like a politely raised eyebrow, the way you'd describe a friend who has it bad. Everything the puzzle hides is the fallout of that crush — the behaviors you can't switch off. Read the clue again after solving and it's less a definition than a wink at FALLINLOVE.
The editorial angle here is that the puzzle never names the person, the relationship or the feeling itself — only the visible fallout. Every answer is a verb an outside observer could catch you doing, which is what makes the set cohere: it's a portrait of someone failing to hide something. Choosing PERSPIRE over a plainer synonym keeps the register slightly formal, and FALLINLOVE sits above it all as the state the six behaviors betray.
