NYT Sunday Crossword of June 29: All-In-Clue-sive

June 29, 2025

The New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle of June 29, 2025 was by Mike Hobin and titled All-In-Clue-sive.

This puzzle’s theme involved Across clues that all shared the identical prompt [Apt clue for the circled letters]. For each, there were three to five consecutive circled cells in the grid. The trick was that the clue’s solution itself doubled as a clue for what belonged in the circled letters. Here’s how it played out:

• TOP RANKING ROYAL (KING in the circled letters). The first theme entry I solved—very satisfying and it made the theme immediately clear.
• TOLKIEN TREE CREATURE (ENT). I haven’t read Tokien yet, so this one was a challenge. Ent doesn’t look like a real word, but with TOLK__ at the start, I could guess it was Tolkien-related, which helped.
• NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN (OFTEN). Many years ago I attended a lecture where the speaker used this phrase so frequently that it stuck with me, which helped me spot the answer.
• PACIFIST’S RENOUNCEMENT (FISTS). Pacifists renounce fisticuffs. Another great one.
• OUR HOME NEAR THE SUN (EARTH). Possibly my favorite. It was neat seeing “Earth” hiding in the phrase like that.
• CAST A REALLY LONG LOOK (STARE).

All nicely done. I liked how the circle letters spanned bits of multiple words, and were not just pulling a single word out of the base phrase.

A tough section

For me, the hardest part was the upper-right corner. The top Across clue, [Unlocked?] seemed to start with BA__, and I’d guessed BARE as in having the bare truth exposed. But the Down crosses didn’t seem to fit:

• [Works, works, works] becomes RA_ORS.
• [Bagpipe’s sound] becomes ER_ONE.

The missing middle letters would have been provided by the Across clue [Famed actress who portrayed Queen Christina in 1933’s Queen Christina], which was starting with GAR__, but I wasn’t confident there.

After writing down plausible BA__ words, I landed on BALD, which matched the clue’s part-of-speech, and I figured it could make sense, as in a “bald” statement with no hidden, locked meaning. With that in place, the section clicked:

• LABORS for the works clue
• DRONE for the bagpipe clue
• GARBO, as in Greta Garbo, for the actress

Solved! But when I looked this up later, I learned my “bald” interpretation was not right; the “unlocked” clue meant “without locks (of hair)”, hence “bald”.

Another tricky clue I solved without actually understanding why was [Ax handlers, perhaps] as ROADIES. Here ax is slang for a guitar.

Other notes

Some other answers of note:

• A SOU completes the phrase “Not worth a sou”. A sou is French for a coin of low denomination. I’d never heard this.
• BEHR, a brand of paint sold at The Home Depot.
• C CLEF, the answer to [Staff symbol for violists]. I suspected clef but did not know the specific C-clef.
• CIRRI, plural of cirrus, referring to wispy clouds.
• DRAKE meaning male duck. I know drake better as a term for a young dragon.
• EIRE, for Éire, the traditional name for Ireland. This keeps coming up and I keep forgetting how it’s spelled.
• LYRE, for [Relative of a zither]. A zither is a family of stringed instruments without a distinct neck.
• OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a US government agency. This came up in a previous puzzle but I could not confidently remember it.
• RIKKI, from “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” by Steely Dan. I hadn’t heard this song, and Rikki looked like an unusual spelling.
• RUB, as in seasoning rubbed onto food before cooking.
• SSTS, short for supersonic transports. These are airplanes that go faster than the speed of sound, roughly twice the speed of standard aircraft. They’re no longer in use; the last passenger flight was in 1978. For the clue [Onetime high speed fliers], I was thinking “onetime” meant “single-use”, like a one-time pad, rather than “past”.
• TACH, short for tachometer, which measures rotation speed. The answer to [R.p.m. gauge, for short].

Final thoughts

Like last week, I managed to finish the puzzle without external research, but again I found at least one mistake when I looked up answers later. For [Employee welfare org.], I vaguely recalled OSHA from a previous puzzle; as I don’t live in the US, it’s not an common term for me. But it produced ASOU for [Not worth ___]. A sou just didn’t look right at all. Words in English don’t have that letter pattern, so I assumed I had misremembered OSHA. I changed it to OLHA, which gave lou, and figured “not worth a lou” was just some phrase I didn’t know. In the end, the original answers were correct, as sou is a French coin. Between the US agency and the French currency, that was a tough square to crack for me.

That said, I really enjoyed this theme. It feels like a theoretically pure and consistent extension to the base puzzle rules, not something completely out of left field like some of the more wacky themes. It seems so natural that I’d be somewhat surprised if it hasn’t been done before; if not, a great innovation!