Crossword editor’s desk: words of the year, welcome Rhea Seehorn and confusion over cheese

New solvers would like to know how our puzzles work and we would like to tell them

Around January in these parts we run a test on the dictionaries’ words of the year. Our thinking is that if a word really has left online cliques and entered general use, a crossword setter will have used it, as crosswords have historically been faster at recording language than the dictionaries themselves.

Of 2025’s winning words, VIBE CODING (Collins) and PARASOCIAL (Cambridge) are nowhere to be seen in puzzles. I expect to see SLOP (Merriam-Webster) in its new AI-generated sense before long, as my sense is that it’s genuinely useful and moving toward more general comprehension.

‘You gotta tell me how to crack the code,’ she pleads before we’ve even said hello. ‘I’m an avid crossword puzzler, but I cannot beat the Guardian crossword. I cannot crack it, and I need to figure out what the problem is.’

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.