Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “Shake on it”
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.
It has exactly the formal, old-document flavor the clue points toward, so solvers slot it in confidently and only later notice the grid never uses it.
It sounds weighty and diplomatic and fits the handshake mood perfectly, so it lingers on the shortlist long after it should have been dropped.
Short, solemn and courtroom-flavored, it looks like exactly the register this puzzle is fishing in, even though nothing on the board needs it.
The gesture in the clue makes this one feel inseparable from the theme, and its stamp-and-parchment flavor keeps it in play far too long.
a textbook decoy
The difficulty sits at 4.5 because "Shake on it" hands you the category almost immediately, yet the individual words stay hidden in a grid full of tempting near-misses like ACCORD, TRUCE and OATH. The unlock is usually PACT — once that short, punchy four-letter word falls, the search space collapses, and AGREEMENT, CONTRACT, COVENANT and TREATY follow quickly because they all cluster around the same abstract idea. LETSMAKEADEAL is easier to guess than to trace: the phrase is famous, but thirteen letters have to thread across a board already crowded with nouns, so many solvers know what they're looking for before they can physically find it. What makes the set trickier than it first appears is that the five answers are only loose synonyms — they range from a private promise to a multinational document, so confirming the theme doesn't guarantee you'll spot them all in order.
The clue is doing something sneaky: it names a gesture, not a thing. "Shake on it" is what you say when you want a promise sealed with a handshake rather than a signed page — an informal, physical version of every word the puzzle hides. That's why it feels so friendly and so vague at once. AGREEMENT, CONTRACT, COVENANT, PACT and TREATY all live in the aftermath of that handshake, while LETSMAKEADEAL is the sentence that comes just before it.
The link between AGREEMENT, CONTRACT, COVENANT, PACT and TREATY isn't just meaning — it's register. The editor picked five nouns that climb a ladder of formality and scale, from a handshake between two people to a document between nations, and deliberately avoided anything concrete: no signatures, no lawyers, no verbs. The joke is that the Spangram, LETSMAKEADEAL, is the only spoken, casual item on an otherwise stiff board.
