LA Times Crossword Answers

About the LA Times Crossword

The Los Angeles Times Crossword has been a staple of American puzzle culture since 1924. Today the puzzle is syndicated to more than 700 newspapers and digital outlets, edited by Patti Varol, who took the chair in 2022 after Rich Norris's 23-year run. The LA Times grid is a 15×15 weekday puzzle with a themed 21×21 Sunday edition, and like the New York Times it follows a clear difficulty ramp through the week: Monday is gentle, Saturday is themeless and brutal, and Sunday is theme-heavy without being a true Saturday-level challenge.

For solvers who treat the LA Times as a daily ritual, missing one answer can derail an otherwise clean grid. That's where we come in. Our editors solve the puzzle the moment it's released, double-check every answer against the published key, and post the full solution in two clean lists: Across and Down, in the order they appear on the grid.

How the LA Times Crossword is structured

Every standard weekday LA Times Crossword is a 15×15 grid with rotational symmetry, typically 76 to 78 entries. Themed puzzles (Monday through Thursday) center on three to five long entries that share a common gimmick — a wordplay twist, a hidden phrase, or a category. Friday and Saturday drop the theme entirely and lean into longer answers and trickier cluing. Sunday's 21×21 puzzle ups the entry count to around 140 and almost always has a title that hints at the theme.

Solving strategy

• Start with the fills you know cold. Three- and four-letter answers anchor the grid and unlock the longer entries.
• Look for question marks. A clue ending in "?" almost always signals a pun or non-literal definition.
• Mind the tense and number. If the clue is plural, the answer is plural; if past tense, the answer ends in -ED or follows the verb's irregular form.
• Crosscheck before committing. An answer that feels right on the Across may not square with the Down crossings.

Why we built this archive

Most crossword answer sites force you through a wall of ads and a thirty-page scroll just to find one fill. We organize the answers by date, then by direction, then by appearance order. If you missed yesterday's puzzle, you'll find it linked under "Recent Archive" above — same clean layout, same one-click access.

About our editorial process

Each puzzle is solved by hand by our senior editor before publication. We verify every answer against the official LA Times solution page, then run a second pass to catch typos and direction-mismatches. If you ever spot an error, our share buttons on each date page include a contact route — we fix reports within an hour.

Frequently asked questions