Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “Please, be my guest!”
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.
It appears almost verbatim in the clue, so it's the first thing anyone hunts for — and it simply isn't in the grid.
A friendly six-letter word that matches the sociable mood exactly and slots easily into a letter grid, but it's a decoy.
Feels like the backbone of any gathering, and it's short and grid-friendly — yet it's a near-miss, not one of the six.
Raising a glass is the picture most solvers form from a clue like this, and five letters fit neatly — but it never turns up.
a textbook decoy
The 4.8 is mostly about the spangram: the clue makes the general territory obvious, but it takes a beat to notice that all six answers are verbs and then to commit to an eleven-letter abstract noun that threads the whole board. WELCOME usually comes out first, and the moment it lands the search space collapses into social actions — INVITE and MEET follow almost instantly, with HOST and ENTERTAIN arriving once you stop hunting for nouns like 'party' or 'dinner'. RECEIVE is the sneaky one, because it reads formal and slightly bureaucratic beside the warmer words, and it's easy to walk straight past it. The spangram is long but its letters are spread across the middle of the grid, so finding it is more of a tracing problem than a guessing one.
NYT's clue, "Please, be my guest!", works as a double exposure. In everyday speech the idiom is what you say when waving someone ahead — a mock-gracious way of granting permission, with nothing to do with actually having anyone over. Read it literally, though, and it's a straight invitation, the sentence that opens the door on today's set. Once you spot the joke in the gap between the throwaway phrase and the real thing, HOSPITALITY stops being an abstraction and becomes the answer.
Notice what the editor left out: no food, no gifts, no party supplies, nothing you could put on a table. The set stays entirely on human actions — HOST, INVITE, WELCOME, RECEIVE, MEET, ENTERTAIN — which is a stricter choice than it looks, since a hospitality puzzle could easily have filled its grid with objects. Keeping every entry a verb about conduct means the theme only clicks once you realize the answers are things you do rather than things you use.
