Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “All charged up”
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 clue practically says it out loud, so your eye keeps snagging on it and it feels like a freebie. It's a classic decoy planted by the theme's own wording.
The first technical term most solvers reach for, and it slots neatly into a 6×8 grid. It reads as a perfect fit before you've tested anything.
Feels indispensable to the subject and hides easily among the letters, tempting you toward hardware that never shows up.
Seven letters, easy to trace, and it sounds central to the idea — plenty of solvers burn a minute here before moving on.
a textbook decoy
CHARGE is what gets you first and costs you a minute — it's sitting right there in the clue, so the puzzle feels half-solved before you've found anything at all. The real unlock is JUICE or SPARK: the moment one of those short, slangy ones lands, the register clicks and CURRENT, POWER, ENERGY and ELECTRICITY tumble out almost automatically, because you're suddenly just listing ways to say the same thing. PLUGGEDIN was the last thing I spotted despite being nine letters, largely because its two halves sit well apart on the board and I kept assuming the streak ended a letter early. What makes this set harder than it looks is that it's a thesaurus entry rather than a tidy list of objects — the physics-class term ELECTRICITY has to coexist with the barroom JUICE, and the grid never tells you which register to expect next.
"All charged up" is a lovely double-edged clue. On the surface it's pure mood — that jittery, caffeinated feeling of being excited about something. Underneath it's completely literal: a thing that's been charged is a thing connected to a supply, which is exactly what PLUGGEDIN says out loud. So the clue is really a description of the Spangram disguised as a description of your mood, and once you catch that bait-and-switch, the run of synonyms — CURRENT, POWER, JUICE, SPARK, ENERGY, ELECTRICITY — stops feeling like guesswork.
The clever part is what the editor left out: no devices, no units, no hardware — just six names for the same invisible thing, pulled from deliberately different registers. ELECTRICITY is the textbook entry, CURRENT the physics one, POWER and ENERGY the abstract pair, JUICE and SPARK the slang. That spread keeps the set slippery: you can't lock a category until you notice it's a thesaurus, not a parts list. PLUGGEDIN supplies the state-of-being the list was missing.
