Woohoo! Hit my 1000 streak today!
@sumobruin Very impressive! Congratulations!
@sumobruin That’s amazing! Congrats!!
The King in question is a double decker and thus a checkers, not a chess piece.
@Fred Baumann Yeah, it seems Sam never played checkers as a kid, so missed out on joyously shouting "KING ME!" when she got a piece to the back rank of her opponent.
@Fred Baumann I was quite astonished to note that gaffe: how does reach adulthood never having played checkers? But I imagine it is becoming more and more common with the availability of computer games….
@Darcey O’D My brain inserted "one" into that sentence so seamlessly that I never noticed its absence until I saw your correction.
@Fred Baumann I thought "double decker checker" with KING meant that King Charles had purview over everything in the UK, including overseeing if people had the correct tickets to ride a double-decker bus. lol oops!
Coincidentally, I tried the word HIED in the Monday Spelling Bee. It was not accepted, but it was totally on my mind when I read the clue for 29 across.
@Sue It’s always frustrating when a word is fine in the crossword but doesn’t make the Spring Bee list. Hard to explain. It’s as if the various puzzle editors never talk to each other or something.
@Sue there are lots of crossword words which don’t make the spelling bee. Conceptually it comes down to words which are more common so that the spelling bee solver has a decent opportunity figure out the words. Crosswords can have harder and more rare words since there are acrosses and downs which give hints…and the clues themselves. Of course wayyyyy too often there are words in the spelling bee I’ve never even heard of…let alone have a snowball’s chance in hell of figuring out.
@Sue Yep. I tried HIED more than once and even looked it up to make sure I was spelling it correctly. Frustrating when legitimate words are not accepted, but I think the idea is to include a lot of words that most people will know and a smattering of harder words. I mostly get frustrated at missing food words, which I guess says more about me than the editor.
@Sue This is exactly why I gave up on Spelling Bee a couple years ago. It was so frustrating to find real words and not have them be accepted.
@Sue I have often felt that the words chosen for inclusion in the Spelling Bee seem quite arbitrary, but as with everything, YMMV in terms of any assessment of what constitutes language “in the vernacular”. But it IS frustrating to find what seems like a common word not accepted. Foolishly, I always have a tendency to type it in again—as if the second try would have a different result! 🙄
@Sue Here is how I reduced my frustration with Spelling Bee: 1. Forget Queen Bee 2. No Four letter words 3. Set the target at Genius Extra credit for hitting Genius on the nose. Double extra credit for Genius without any pangrams.
HIED for hurried is one hell of a clue for a Tuesday
@Steven M. It was a gimme for me, but my dad liked to quote Shakespeare. He could also recite Burns, with the accent, and did so to the point that I could, too.
@Eddie I’m not sure what you’re meaning to do here. The novelty is wearing off.
Because his successes far outweigh his failures, I see Eddie's posts as "did-ness as usual". I find his posts as a quirky lovely addition to the comments section. They add a touch of unpretentiousness and success.
@Eddie Nicely done...your pearl is being coated. Im in awe. Keep up the good work.
@Eddie I was scrolling down, looking for you, Eddie. I done did it, too.
@Eddie - You pay no never mind to the ornery shagnasites who're trying to harsh your buzz!
Did not enjoy seeing HOTORNOT. We were absolutely horrible to young women in the public eye in the 2000s.
@Jamie It was indeed despicable. But I think guys were caught up in it, too.
@Jamie “Were”? I think they have iphone apps these days that rate how one looks based on “golden ratio”.
@Jamie Exactly my thought as I entered it.
@Jamie Yet we still have People Magazine’s sexiest man alive.
Double decker checker is not the King in chess, it is when a checker is moved all the way to the opponents first row whereupon you put another checker on top of it making it "double decker". It can then move in both directions.
@Fabe I haven’t played checkers in ages, but isn’t that why you say, “King me!” when you get to the other end of the board? Thus, when you add the second checker, which is now a double decker, aren’t you now a “king”? (It was fun to write that last sentence!)
At one point, I stopped solving to check the day of the week. What a crunchy Tuesday! (But not, erm, painfully so.) I wondered about Sting, the self -described "KING of Pain," and what exclamations he might have used. Probably not publishable, lest The Police of emus be awakened from their slumber. <a href="https://youtu.be/SZlRX03BzeA?si=CiZJj1Cv0rbdXH3J" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/SZlRX03BzeA?si=CiZJj1Cv0rbdXH3J</a> Congratulations on and thank you for a delightful debut, Gene! It's been a very real pleasure to solve your puzzle.
@sotto voce I too was pleasantly surprised by the resistance this puzzle put up. I wish all Tuesdays had this much bite.
Tuesday puzzles have been great, lately. Much prefer a Tuesday that’s closer to a Wednesday than a Monday. This one was still simple enough but still checked the ego in just the right way when I first got started and expected to breeze through.
Thoughts: • Quality debut, with hardly a whiff of junk and a pitch-perfect Tuesday theme. • That theme is original, BTW, never done before in the major crossword outlets. • Sweet that the pain answers not only grow in size, but also grow from down to up. • If your solving time was a little longer than usual, could be because the grid has an extra column. • Beauty in answer: SCEPTER, ON A WHIM, OOMPH. • Touch of irony in that the answer NO CLUE has one. • Very nice that both chess and checkers are represented. • Serendipities: The lovely abutting PuzzPair© of SMOKED/CAVIAR, rare-in-crosswords five-letter semordnilap (ELIOT), and ooh – five double O’s! Much promise here, and I eagerly await your coming themeless, Gene. Thank you for a splendid outing!
Perfectly decent Tuesday puzzle. I found it a bit on the easy side, but YMMV. I loved the clue "Double decker checker". I assume I wasn't the only one who was thinking that there must be a name for the official who checks for tickets on the top of a double decker bus. (A bit shocking, however, that Sam thought that this was a chess reference, when "checker" is in the clue!)
@The X-Phile D’oh. I interpreted “checker” to mean a chess piece that checks, but am now realizing that the king is really more of a checkee.
If I remember correctly, when you "king" a piece in checkers, you put one checker on top of the other. Hence the double decker.
@The X-Phile I spent a moment thinking taxi (grew up in NY with checker cabs, but confused because double decker surely meant bus…tried to imagine a double decker checker cab). Seemed like such a clear clue, except it just didn’t work ;)
It's old news that you can tell something of the constructor by the puzzle, choice of words, phrasing of clues...like those bro-puzzles with lots of PAC-10, umps, refs, Astros, Bruins, or the Gen-Z kind, more hipster. I get a feeling Gene likes it all, and would be a great person to hang out with, conversant on many topics, and wouldn't turn down some smoked salmon & caviar, followed by cigars, or see the irony in an O. Henry story. And when the photo shoot zooms in on Buddy Ebsen, you know this puzzle pans out! (Yes, I'm shamelessly trying to rile the pan vs. zoom crowd). A scene from O. Henry's "Seats of the Haughty": "At six o'clock me and Solly sat down to dinner. Spread! There's nothing been seen like it since the Cambon snack. It was all served at once. The chef called it dinnay à la poker. It's a famous thing among the gourmands of the West. The dinner comes in threes of a kind. There was guinea-fowls, guinea-pigs, and Guinness's stout; roast veal, mock turtle soup, and chicken pâté; shad-roe, caviar, and tapioca; canvas-back duck, canvas-back ham, and cotton-tail rabbit; Philadelphia capon, fried snails, and sloe-gin—and so on, in threes. The idea was that you eat nearly all you can of them, and then the waiter takes away the discard and gives you pears to fill on."
I really am a latecomer to O. Henry, but he's not just a one trick pony. And some of his stories have exquisite prose. Here's a single paragraph from "Hearts and Roses." At Dry Lake, where their routes diverged, they reined up for a parting cigarette. For miles they had ridden in silence save for the soft drum of the ponies' hoofs on the matted mesquite grass, and the rattle of the chaparral against their wooden stirrups. But in Texas discourse is seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis. So, without apology, Webb offered an addendum to the conversation that had begun ten miles away.
@john ezra I was a bit surprised that Sam Corbin didn’t mention O. Henry in her review. I know that she has appeared at the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships (held on the grounds of the little house in downtown Austin where William Sydney Porter lived when he was (allegedly) an embezzling bank clerk).
I'm surprised there isn't more beefing about STARVE. In my head, it doesn't fit. To starve someone of attention means to deny attention. To be starved for attention means to long for attention. I can't create a sentence with "starve for" that makes sense. I don't think "they starve for attention" works. Am I missing it? Unless as SP mentioned, we're talking about a hunger strike.
@Nora Very fair point. The crosses made it so easy that I didn't give it much thought, but I think what you are saying about the precision of the clue is very valid.
@Nora I should have added that I thoroughly enjoyed the puzzle, fun entries and cluing. Just a wee nit about this one.
@Nora I gave it the "close enough to get it" pass.
OOPS--double-decker checker is a KING as in what happens when you reach the opposite end of the board and you say: "King me." Some clean expressions of pains could be: moan, groan, argh, bleh, yeek. When I broke my ankle in three places the first thing I said was: "I broke both of my feet." LOL.
@Ms. Billie M. Spaight Today I wear the dunce hat.
@Ms. Billie M. Spaight In the game of draughts (checkers) Some of us say "Crown me" and the doubler is called a 'crowner.'
Fun, challenging puzzle, but closer to a Wednesday in difficulty. L
Ms Sam asks about "shoot" as an exclamation of pain. I can't give you the etymology but I immediately thought of the version that means new growth of plants. I'd say that "shoot" is a perfect solve for a puzzle about growing pains.
@SBK Ooh, I LOVE this interpretation!!
@SBK I saw "shoot" first and thought the theme would be plants! I was a tad disappointed because it would be a fun spring puzzle
Congratulations on a nice debut, Mr. de Vera! I had the pleasure of writing it up for Diary of a Crossword Fiend. <a href="https://crosswordfiend.com/2025/04/28/tuesday-april-29-2025/#ny" target="_blank">https://crosswordfiend.com/2025/04/28/tuesday-april-29-2025/#ny</a> I hope we'll see you back here soon!
@Eric Hougland Fantastically written review. And so on point! Great video as well. Kudos!
@Eric Hougland Enjoyed reading your review. I think I must have been on the constructor's wavelength because I didn't find this puzzle as crunchy as others did. OTOH, I often struggle with puzzles that others find to be a breeze! The only entry that held me up was confusing Jed for (ink)Jet and entering Epson instead of Ebsen, but that's just because I'm a lousy speller. I entered GETEM first but was aware I might have to change it to sicEM depending on the crosses. Fortunately, I guessed right. I wish HOTORNOT hadn't come to me so readily. Ugh.
Nice Tuesday workout. A bit on the slow side for me, and must admit I didn't really catch on to the trick until I was almost done. No big deal - just made for a nice 'aha' moment. One clue history search today was for TANGENT. Just wondered if it had ever been clued as a two word phrase. Yep - but mostly only in variety puzzles. And early in my life when I was doing outdoor labor, that definitely would have applied to me. But that did lead me to one of the more remarkable puzzles I've ever seen - a Sunday from February 12, 2017 by Lynn Lempel with the title "Do the splits." In that one the clue/answer was: "Berate some guy for getting too much sun?" GOOFFONATANGENT And... some other theme answers, which I've divided as implied by the clues: POE TRY READING LAB OR PARTY JUST ICE FOR ALL FAT AL ATTRACTION FUMANCHU MUST ACHE And there were more. Here's the Xword Info link: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=2/12/2017&g=23&d=A" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=2/12/2017&g=23&d=A</a> I'll put some other puzzle finds in replies. ....
@Rich in Atlanta As threatened - two puzzles. I won't list any of the answers, I'll just supply the links. They both had exactly the same grid pattern which was a record for both most 15 letter answers in any puzzle (12) and most 3 letter answers in any puzzle (44). Here they are: A Friday from October 30, 2009 by David Levinson Wilk: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=10/30/2009&g=11&d=D" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=10/30/2009&g=11&d=D</a> And a Friday from May 24, 2013 by Joe Krozel: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=5/24/2013" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=5/24/2013</a> I'm done. ....
Some of the complaints about idioms and abbreviations "these days" (supposedly due to crossword-construction apps) made me wonder if we haven't always had these in crosswords, so I took a look at Tuesday, November 23, 1993 (the oldest Tuesday in the archive) to see whether the puzzles were any better back then. Obviously a somewhat random sample, but we have: RST (Alphabetic run) OHS (Words of wonderment) OOH (Cry of delight [in the same puzzle as OHS, for shame!]) OSE (Sugary suffix) ABELL (Sound as _____) GOTTA (Must, slangily) PPPS (Third addendum to a letter) Even EBSEN made an appearance, just as it did today. The more things change, the more they stay the same!
Dave, If you're really a glutton for punishment of this sort, look at some of the puzzles in "Crosswords from The Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project" on xwordinfo.com.
@Barry Ancona Long before I subscribed to the Sunday paper and subsequently switched to the app, my NYT crossword experience was the Sunday Omnibus. I finished a few before I bought one edited by Mr. Maleska. It remains unfinished somewhere in my house.
A steady Tuesday. A little crunchy but quite doable (sorry @BJ, but that is the word that works for me. Perhaps skip over my comments if it’s too cringey for you🤷♀️). Happy to see I’m not the only one caught in the EB?N/O?O trap. A Spanish word crossing an unknown actor in an unknown programme will get me every time. The joys of international crossword solving. Glad to see the lights come back on in Spain and Portugal. That must have been scary.
@Helen Wright It probably helps to be an American of a certain age to have Buddy Ebsen as a gimme answer. The Beverly Hillbillies was a number one TV program in the sixties, and also spawned a spin-off, Petticoat Junction. Ebsen started out as a dancer in the twenties and transitioned to a popular TV star at the end of his long career, with roles as varied as a private eye and Davy Crockett’s sidekick, in addition to the Arkansas hayseed who found oil on his property.
@Helen Wright, Wow! You kicked off quite the discussion, complete with an excellent summary of Buddy Ebsen’s long and storied career. Who knew that the New York Times Crossword commentariat would know so much about the Beverly Hillbillies? :)
you know - for 8D a double decker checker is KING in a checkers game. two stacked checker pieces signify a king. but only when it reaches the end of the opposite side of the board. quite a clever clue.
The black squares in the graph reminded me of Space Invaders. Anyone else? No? Just me then.
A little chewy for a Tuesday. Got off to a great start then found hot or not a huge not. Elo as a chess rating system is beyond my knowledge. Ended up faster than average but chewy.
@Megan ELO has been here before, and not just as the Electric Light Orchestra. I used to have an online Scrabble game that assigned ELO ratings to players. It was fun to watch my ELO rating go up.
Actual words are much more fun to solve than idiomatic slang phrases and proper names of the obscure - I blame the apps crossword makers use for throwing up too much dross filler.
@Spmm It's not the apps; it's the constructors who don't pare their word lists down. I can't blame them too much. Every word you take out of your word lists makes it marginally harder to fill a grid. And editing a word list is a time-consuming process.
Two comments: 1) it really seems like a slap in the face to the crossword gods to have “smoked” and “caviar” right next to each other and not take the opportunity to clue them together. Even on a Tuesday—just clue the downs more gently if needed. 2) maybe this is a nit—and I’m happy to retract it if I’m wrong—but I don’t think you can “starve for attention”. You may be “starved for attention” (ie very hungry) or “starving for attention” which means the same thing, but that’s still a prepositional adjective and not a verb form. “Starve for attention” sounds like you are physically not eating to get attention, which I suppose you can do, but that’s not the normal usage.
a double decker checker isn't a chess piece it's a checker piece. when you reach the other end of the board you say KING ME and get another piece on top of the piece or checker you already have.
Was so super excited to see TANGENT LINES! Esoteric finance stuff ahead: I teach a class in Fixed Income and one of the concepts is estimating how much a bond's price changes for a given change in interest rates. The actual relation is non-linear (convex) and so we approximate the change with a tangent line. The slope of the TANGENT LINE is called duration, and it's a super important concept for bond investors because it gives them a very intuitive sense of price volatility of their bond for a 1 percent (100 basis point) change in yields. Longer term bonds generally have higher duration (in case you're wondering) and this is why investors prefer short term bonds in times of financial uncertainty (like I don't know, right now.) I'm always jumping up and down and drawing pictures on the board when I teach this. Can't wait to show this puzzle to my Fall students. If both TANGENT LINES and DURATION showed up in the same puzzle, my life would be complete 🤣🤣.
@Niki B Stopped jumping up and down in the classroom long ago, but I agree that linear approximation/ differentials (or marginal analysis, as economists might call this) are very useful tools in one's calculus toolkit.
@Niki B I remember studying for the CFA level I exam and thinking I was NEVER going to understand duration and convexity! One day I hope to see a crossword filled with all kinds of financial terms.
I liked the puzzle because it had really fresh fill within a Tuesday level of difficulty. Made me smile.
I think this is a fun, well done, and appropriate Tuesday. There were 3 totally unknowns for me, but easily filled from crosses. And I started it too late in the evening and was tired so got stuck on some wordplay. After a good nights sleep, a fun puppy romp, crossing off “eradicate fire ants” from my to do list (hopefully for a few months at least), I was able to finish the crossword before breakfast. A satisfying morning. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t smile at OOF. Thanks Gene Louise de Vera, and congrats on your NYT debut!
Can we dispense with the words "chewy" and "crunchy" to describe puzzles? I think their time has come and gone.
@BJ Cartilaginous takes too long to type and has a bit of a negative connotation. Toothsome? Scrummy? Chewy just seems...well...right as a descriptor of a crossword that required a little extra gnawing. And crunchy, of course, adds texture to that chewiness--maybe with more modernisms or sparkly wordplay. YMMV.
@BJ Are you trying to gum up the works? ? ? ?
Very nice debut with a toothsome, dare I say chewy, finish towards the bottom but the S of STPATS was the last to fill. Many thanks.
Cartilaginous for a Tuesday, but without any negative connotation. I've never had any cleaning brands say anything to me. Lies, all lies! (Lysol lies)
Dang it -- I got caught by Jed Clampett and a Spanish bear.
Hamlet tells Ophelia, "Hie thee to a nunnery!" Remembering the Old Bard comes in handy.
@Bruce I believe it's "Get thee to a nunnery" but there is "Hie thee hither" in Macbeth!
flED before HIED, sicEM before GET EM, that *never* happens on a Tuesday. I liked it! I'm very much looking forward to Gene's upcoming themeless. As for the column photo, I think the "GENT" will regret his decision when his friend takes her next step. Talk about OUCH........
How the heck does ONYX derive from "claw?" "Hey, look at this cool rock I found! What should I call it?" "Hmm, it's really black, reminds me of a claw." "Seriously? Well, I guess so, ONYX it is." I think the Greeks smoked a lot of dope.
Grant, I didn't know either, so I looked it up. "So called because the mineral's color sometimes resembles that of a human fingernail, pink with white streaks." <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/onyx" target="_blank">https://www.etymonline.com/word/onyx</a>
@Grant Yeah, I thought the clue was a bit of a stretch / misdirection. The name derives from the Greek for "fingernail", which happens to be their word for "claw", too. Dinosaurs with names ending in "-onyx" (like Baryonyx) have names that *really* derive from the Greek word for "claw". You may (or may not) be interested to know that a person who bites their fingernails is an "onychophagist"---a "nail eater", not a "claw eater".
@Grant To add to what our Scottish anaesthetist has already pointed out, we also have medical-speak onychomycosis (nail fungus), onychoschizia (split nails), and onychogryphosis (thick/curled nails). The term “ungula” has also been used, as in subungual hematoma, or a bruise under a nail. Of the 148 times ONYX has been clued, this was a first. Nice job!
Apologies if this has been posted already, but some might be interested to know that (improbably enough) the fella with the woman running across his chest, pictured at the head of the Wordplay column, is none other than British national treasure, the satirist Peter Cook. The scene was filmed for a very short-lived chat show, hosted by Cook, entitled "Where Do I Sit?"
@Oikofuge Oh. I see now that there has already been some discussion of this, yesterday, started by @K Barrett.
@Oikofuge Hah, I hadn’t noticed. I’m a tad young for his antics, but I do remember reruns of his programme with Dudley Moore. The sketches with the two old codgers in the pub always cracked me up.
@Oikofuge Thank you! I was wondering about the origins of that photo.
@Oikofuge He'll always be "Impressive Clergyman" to me. At my sister's wedding, the priest began the homily with "Mawwiage...". Glad to be reminded of The Princess Bride again today! <a href="https://youtu.be/_bY0fdgpISc?si=AlGf1kQA2hr-udKe" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/_bY0fdgpISc?si=AlGf1kQA2hr-udKe</a>
SHOOT! My first thought on solving 21A was that the shaded boxes would be "pa, pai, pain, pains". That was ERRANT, but it would have been fun. I haven't played checkers in years. KING me!
I think your interpretation for the answer for 8D may be a bit off course. I don't play chess but in the game of checkers, when your piece reaches the back of the opposing side a second checker is put on top of it and it becomes a king, able to roam the board at will. That's how I interpreted that clue.
As an Irish person, St Pats is very very VERY wrong. Nobody refers to our patron saint as Pat. Its St Patricks Day, or familiarly, it's Paddy's Day. I wont even start on Patty's Day....
@Ciarán In a different thread, I noted how Americans and Brits say many things differently. The same is true about Americans and Irish. Whereas ST PATS seems very wrong to you, it’s fairly common and normal here. Irish immigrants brought their culture to the US, but things diverged somewhat. For example, here, a typical “Irish” meal for March 17, whatever you call the day, is corned beef and cabbage, which is not typical in Ireland. In a similar vein, Cinco de Mayo is the “big Mexican holiday” in the US, whereas it’s not a major holiday in most of Mexico. And we consider hard-shelled tacos to be the quintessential Mexican dish, but they’re virtually unknown south of the border. Similarly, spaghetti and meatballs, our idea of a typical Italian meal, is barely found in Italy. Most supposedly Chinese dishes were invented in the US and are unknown in China. Cultures come to the US and do their own thing. So if you visit us in March, be prepared to have corned beef and cabbage on ST. PAT’S day. At least the shamrock is still the same.
That was fun! Congratulations on your debut, Gene. Looking forward to the next one.
Anyone else find themselves correcting their posture with 32D? I liked today's puzzle a lot--I love when early week puzzles have a theme/trick, I remember when I was a new crossword solver and Monday/Tuesday were the only puzzles I could routinely solve without help or checking the answers, and it was always nice to get to figure out a theme!
to quote Sir Percy: Sink me! Checkers with gramp was a summer tradition. The board was atop an old nail barrel. Those were the days. Nice one Gene. One could look at a salmon on a plate and reference it as "smoked" as in offed, kilt, etc.
hied is a crazy word to keep in a puzzle lol
I am curious about the photo. What’s it from?
@Jim Cohoon that got me too. google lens says: "Where Do I Sit? British comic actor Peter Cook (1937 - 1995) with actress Judy Huxtable, filming a scene for the television show 'Where Do I Sit?' at Black Park, Buckinghamshire, 21st January 1971. (Photo by Stan Meagher/Daily Express/Getty Images)"
That is not what a tangent line is
@Patrick I think it is. My understanding is that for a smoothly changing function, the best approximation of that curve at some point is the tangent line of the curve at that point. It will fit the actual point perfectly, and will minimize the discrepancy in the neighborhood of that point.
@Patrick @Francis @Ben The slope of the curve is defined to be the slope of the tangent line at that point. A small segment of the tangent line through the point approximates the curve in the sense that as the length of the segment shrinks the segment itself gets closer to the curve at that point. So, technically, it's the small pieces of the line that approximate the curve. This is actually analytic geometry which is commonly taught with calculus. So, any technical calculus book (one used for teaching math, science, engineering students) would be a good reference. Sorry, any specific book I can name is likely to be out of date.
@Patrick I wonder if "secant line" might be what the clue more closely describes.
@Patrick Close enough for this professional mathematician. Though "Figures that are local approximations of curves, in calculus" seems better.
@Patrick see my other post, in bond pricing we call it a tangent line.
Nice debut, Gene. Had me going for a while, but I managed to get this squared away without too much trouble. Had to dig HIED out of the memory banks, but it's certainly not a new word for me. Was not familiar with HOT OR NOT, as I don't ever recall seeing anything about it, let alone visiting it.
Today 29A or went in haste solves to a word that today's Spelling Bee rejects. And it's not a proper noun either.
@Sandip because it's a verb, third person singular. One hies oneself to somewhere, possibly a nunnery. Oh and give up thinking that Crossword words all belong in the Spelling Bee. This is a Venn diagram with an area of no overlap. All Spelling Bee words are fair game in the Crossword, but not vice versa.