Okay, let’s talk about today’s little crossword adventure. I was working through the New York Times puzzle, you know, my usual morning routine with a cup of coffee.
Things were going pretty smoothly until I hit this one clue. It wasn’t super long, just four letters. The clue itself was Italian for year. Simple enough, right? Well, my brain kind of stalled for a second.
My first instinct was… well, nothing concrete. My Italian is patchy at best. I know ‘ciao’, ‘grazie’, maybe order some pasta, but ‘year’? That wasn’t immediately coming to mind. I started thinking about related words. Does it sound like any English words? Not really. Maybe something related to numbers? Like ‘uno’? No, that’s ‘one’. Doesn’t fit ‘year’.
So, I looked at the grid itself. Four boxes. Okay. Did I have any crossing letters yet? Let’s see… Ah, yes. I’d already filled in a word going down that gave me the third letter. It looked like it had to be an ‘N’. So the pattern was _ _ N _.
Four letters, ending maybe in ‘O’ like many Italian words? Let’s try that mentally. _ _ N O. What starts it? A vowel probably. Maybe ‘A’? A-N-N-O? Anno. Yeah, that rang a bell. I think I’ve heard that before. ‘Anno Domini’, right? Year of the Lord. That sounds like it.
I penciled it in. A-N-N-O. Checked the crossing letter ‘N’ again, made sure it still worked with the down clue. Yep, it fit perfectly. Felt pretty confident about that one.
It’s always satisfying when you dredge up one of those foreign words from the back of your memory, especially with a little help from the crossing clues. So yeah, that was my little journey to get ‘anno’ for ‘Italian for year’ today. Just another small victory in the daily grid battle.
