Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “Practically paleolithic”
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.
A heavy, Latinate adjective that sounds exactly like the register this clue is fishing for; it's long, tempting, and never resolves cleanly in the grid.
Short, atmospheric and history-adjacent, so it feels like a natural fit; many solvers trace it early and lose a minute before moving on.
Common, five letters, and plausibly paired with a prehistoric-sounding clue — a classic false start that hides easily among common letters.
The clue's cave-and-flint imagery invites it, and it tucks neatly into a dense grid, but it's a plain noun and the trace never closes.
a textbook decoy
The clue is generous — 'practically paleolithic' points straight at sheer age — so the opening minutes feel easy and the real difficulty lives in the leftovers. PRIMEVAL is usually the unlock: once that long word is traced, the rest of the synonym cluster collapses fast, because every placement narrows the field for ANCIENT, ARCHAIC, BYGONE and TIMEWORN. TIMEWORN is the sneaky one, measuring wear rather than years, and BYGONE hides behind its quaint spelling. Spotting the spangram is the last hurdle: THATSOLDNEWS runs across the board as a spoken aside rather than a themed noun, so it only becomes obvious once you sense the puzzle is winking at you. What makes the set trickier than it looks is that five words compete on one continuous scale with no fixed anchor, so theme logic alone can't separate them — letter tracing still decides.
The clue is a joke dressed as a description: nobody is actually from the Paleolithic era, so 'practically paleolithic' is our everyday hyperbole for anything hopelessly out of date — a phone, a haircut, a take. It sets the register for the whole solve, where ANCIENT, ARCHAIC, BYGONE, PRIMEVAL and TIMEWORN all measure the same thing by degrees. And it dovetails neatly with the spangram, THATSOLDNEWS — the same dismissal delivered as a shrug instead of a dictionary entry.
The editor's angle is deliberately abstract: no named eras, artifacts or dated objects — every entry is an adjective measuring duration itself, from merely passé to geological. ANCIENT, ARCHAIC, BYGONE, PRIMEVAL and TIMEWORN form a graded scale rather than a list, and none names a physical thing, which is why the set stays slippery even after the theme clicks. The spangram flips registers entirely, trading lexical precision for a spoken aside: THATSOLDNEWS. No single anchor makes this set harder than it looks.
