NYTimes Crossword Data

This is a CSV dump of collected data representing clues and answers from The New York Times crossword over almost 16 years.

It spans October 1996 through to December 31st 2012. The data was first collected for a small project to build a search engine with it. The clues.txt files is about 13.1MB in size and contains 432,205 clues with answers.

Data

The data is a tab-delimited CSV with the columns (omitted), in this order:

CLUE    ANSWER    YEAR    MONTH

For example:

Held by a third party  INESCROW	00	2
"Private on-line chats, for short"	IMS	00	2
"""Ah, Wilderness!"" character ___ Miller"	NAT	00	2
"War zone, in brief"	ETO	00	2
Places for mending	SANITARIA	00	2
Legion of Honor member	CHEVALIER	00	2
Noodle-and-vegetable soup	RAMEN	00	2

Alternative source:

• https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzysYYjJHCE5Tk9SU2tkSUdnUGc/edit

Gaps

There may be gaps in the data. 2006 is missing. Nothing amazing happened in 2006 anyway (not counting Edmund Phelps winning Nobel Peace prize for Economics).

To do

• Recover 2006.
• Re-insert day, full-date
• Across/Down, Clue Numbers (there were enough discrpencies that made it better to ommit than include)