What is a crossword puzzle, really, but some tricks and some treats? After a few months spent hard at work in the puzzling lab, we're ready to start our weekly crossword, which will run here at Defector every Monday. (Thanks to the thousands of you who gave us feedback on the pilot puzzle we published in August.) We're launching this puzzle in partnership with our friends at AVCX, the excellent independent subscription crossword outlet.
Starting next week, Defector puzzles will live behind the subscriber paywall, but this one, constructed by Ben Zimmer and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu, is free to try. Ben is a linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut. He is the language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee, and vocabulary judge for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.
