Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “Putting on airs”
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.
7 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.
Seven letters, a perfect tonal fit, and it slots into this puzzle's mood so naturally that it often gets circled before it's checked.
A showy-looking word that matches the clue's tone beautifully, which is exactly why solvers hunt for letters that aren't there.
Short, common, and tonally on-theme; its four letters are easy to trace in a crowded grid, so it feels like a hit even when it isn't.
A behavior word that sounds like it belongs alongside the rest of the set, making it a tempting first guess that never completes.
a textbook decoy
The 5.0 comes down to a clue that points at attitude rather than action: 'Putting on airs' feels literary, so the first words most solvers spot are the short, blunt ones — BRAG and BOAST — and those two immediately collapse the rest of the set, since BLUSTER, FLEX, GLOAT, POSTURE and STRUT all live in the same behavioral neighborhood. FLEX is the sneaky one, since it reads as a noun long before it reads as a verb, and nailing it opens up the board. The remaining letters then almost arrange themselves into GRANDIOSITY, but that's only true in hindsight: an eleven-letter abstract noun is nearly impossible to guess cold. What makes this set trickier than it looks is the mixed grammar — POSTURE and STRUT are usually nouns you can see, while BRAG and GLOAT are almost always verbs — so pattern-matching on part of speech sends you down the wrong path.
'Putting on airs' is a lovely bit of old-fashioned English: it originally conjured someone affecting finer manners than their station deserved — literally wearing an air of superiority. That's exactly the spirit the puzzle channels. Every answer, from BRAG and BOAST to STRUT and POSTURE, is a small act of performance, and the spangram GRANDIOSITY is the inflated self-image underneath all of them. The clue never says 'boasting' outright, which is why the theme only clicks after your second or third word.
What distinguishes this set is that it dodges the obvious nouns of the subject — no PRIDE, no VANITY, no EGO — and stays almost entirely with verbs of performance. That forces solvers to think about behavior rather than labels, which makes the grid noticeably harder. The seven words split neatly between noise (BLUSTER, BOAST, BRAG, GLOAT) and body language (FLEX, POSTURE, STRUT), and GRANDIOSITY earns its span precisely because it steps back to name the inner state that all seven outward performances are staging.
