Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “On the sly ...”
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.
Crafty has the right tricky, playful flavor, so it's a very tempting wrong turn.
Cunning is a classic decoy—it sounds exactly like the kind of word this puzzle wants.
Hidden suits the mysterious atmosphere, but it's not part of the set.
Shadow matches the mood and could easily hide in the letter grid.
a textbook decoy
The 5.0 difficulty feels right because the clue 'On the sly ...' immediately telegraphs a synonym set, and COVERT is usually the first word solvers spot, which collapses the rest of the grid. Once COVERT is placed, the remaining adjectives—DEVIOUS, FURTIVE, SHIFTY, and STEALTHY—converge quickly because they all share the same moral tone and can be tested against the same letter patterns. The spangram was moderately tricky to spot: SNEAKINGAROUND is a 14-letter phrase that snakes through the board in a non-obvious path, but the theme made it guessable before it was found. What makes this set harder to group than it first appears is that FURTIVE and STEALTHY are less common than CRAFTY or CUNNING, so solvers may second-guess whether they belong, especially when familiar synonyms like CUNNING are also hidden as traps.
The clue 'On the sly ...' is a classic idiom meaning to do something secretly or sneakily, and it sets the exact tone for today's theme of hidden, underhanded adjectives. The ellipsis is a nice touch—it trails off like someone tiptoeing away mid-sentence, which mirrors the spangram SNEAKINGAROUND. Tracy Bennett clearly wanted solvers to feel the mischief before they even found a word, and the clue works as a wink rather than a riddle: once you recognize the idiom, the whole set of synonyms falls into place.
The editorial choice here is a pure adjective cluster—no nouns or verbs—so the puzzle reads like a thesaurus page. What distinguishes this set is that none of the answers name an actual act; they're all personality descriptors, keeping the theme abstract and forcing attention to nuance. SNEAKINGAROUND flips that abstraction into a concrete action, tying the adjectives to one behavior. It's a tight, cohesive word family rather than a random synonym grab.
