Crossclimb answers archive

October 2026 (19)

September 2026 (28)

Longer ladders on the weekend

Thirty-three of the 38 ladders used four-letter words. Four used five-letter words and one used six. All five longer ladders fell on a weekend, and four of them on a Sunday: four of the five Sundays in the window ran longer words, while 4 October went back to KILO and LIMA. The hub mentions five-letter variants; this window says Sunday is the day to expect them.

Longer words change how you order the rungs. With five or six letters there are more positions that could change, so a pair of words can look close without being neighbours. The one-letter rule still holds exactly, and counting differing letters is still the fastest check.

Seven words, six steps

Every ladder in the window held seven words: five clued rungs plus the two caps. That makes 228 one-letter steps across the 38 puzzles, and every one of them changed exactly one letter. If your ordering needs a two-letter jump anywhere, one of your rungs is the wrong word.

It also means the two caps usually have little in common on the surface. On 23 of the 38 ladders the top and bottom words shared no letter in the same position, as with TOWN and HALL (#856) or MARK and DOWN (#890). Only FLIP and FLOP, BACK and PACK, and FOSTER and FATHER shared three. Don't expect the caps to look alike; expect them to make sense together.

Which letter changes?

On the 33 four-letter ladders there were 198 steps. The changed letter was spread across all four positions, but not evenly:

The first letter changed most often and the second least. In practice, when two rungs look like neighbours, compare first letters first, then the last two. The second letter was the least likely to move, so two words that differ there are less likely to sit next to each other.

• First letter: 59 steps
• Second letter: 41 steps
• Third letter: 50 steps
• Fourth letter: 48 steps

Consonants do most of the moving

Only 49 of the 228 steps swapped one vowel for another (BELL to BALL on #884, for example). The rest changed a consonant, or swapped a vowel and a consonant. When you are stuck, try changing the first letter before you try changing the vowel.

That first-letter habit pays off most at the caps. The top word sits one letter from rung one, so changing its first letter is the quickest way to test candidates for the final clue.

Caps that read as one phrase

By my reading, 26 of the 38 cap pairs read straight through as a compound or a phrase: TOWN HALL, RULE BOOK, BACK PACK, FLIP FLOP, WELL SAID, TEAM WORK, MARK DOWN, FREE WILL, CLEAN SWEEP, LOIS LANE. The other 12 were pairs linked some other way, such as opposites, siblings or set members: HIDE and SEEK, HARD and FAST, MAMA and PAPA, LUKE and LEIA, KILO and LIMA, HEAD and TOES.

So when the final clue appears, the first thing to try is a two-word phrase. The caps are the finish line, and a phrase is the most common shape they take.

The rungs between the caps rarely relate to them in meaning. FLIP to FLOP (#882) ran through SLIP, SLIT, SLOT, SLOW and FLOW; WELL to SAID (#884) passed through BELL, BALL, BALD, BAND and SAND. Solve the caps from the final clue and the one-letter rule, not from what the rungs mean.

A ladder in full

One ladder shows the whole trap in miniature. Two neighbouring rungs on #882 had nearly identical clues, “Extremely narrow opening” and “Narrow opening”, and the only way to tell SLIT from SLOT was the letter chain around them:

Order the chain and the answer is forced. SLIP needs a neighbour one letter away, and only SLIT fits; SLOW needs one too, and only SLOT does. The clues alone would have let you swap the two, and the ladder would not have connected.

FLIP → SLIP → SLIT → SLOT → SLOW → FLOW → FLOP— Crossclimb #882, 29 September 2026

Words that came back

Crossclimb's vocabulary is small enough to repeat. ROPE appeared three times in the window, twice as a rung and once as a cap. TOLL, SETS, ROLE, RIPE, WANE, BARK, COOL, COAL, HEAD, WIND, FREE and BAND each appeared twice. FREE was the top cap on both of its days (FREE HAND, FREE WILL), and WIND the bottom cap on both of its (WEST WIND, COAL and WIND). A word you have seen in a ladder before is a strong candidate when a clue offers two plausible synonyms.

The clues for repeated words changed each time. TOLL was “You may pay it to go over a bridge” on #856 and “Cost to drive on some roadways” on #874, so recognising the word, not the clue, is what carries over.

Fill-in-the-blank clues

Nineteen of the 190 rung clues in the window contained a blank, such as “___ and rave” (RANT) or “Wax and ___” (WANE). Those are usually the fastest rungs to solve, because the phrase gives you the word directly. Solve them first and use them as anchors when ordering the ladder.

A few clues reached outside the dictionary. #859 used an emoji in its clue for POKES, #886 clued POPE as “Leo XIV, for one”, and #892 clued DATE as “10/10/26, for example”. These are rare, but they are a reminder that the clue writer expects a little general knowledge alongside the wordplay.

Practice plan using the archive

A finished ladder still makes useful practice if you hide part of it:

Keep the drills short. Five minutes on two old ladders is enough to sharpen the ordering step, which is where the timer usually runs away from people.

• Order drill. Write the five rung words from a day page on paper, shuffled, and order them by the one-letter rule before checking.
• Cap drill. Cover the caps, look at rungs one and five, and list every word one letter away from each. Then pick the pair that forms a phrase.
• Weekend drill. Replay the five longer ladders in the table above. Longer words mean more one-letter neighbours to rule out.

Finding a ladder by its caps

Because the summary column shows the top and bottom words, the fastest way to find a ladder you remember is your browser's find-in-page with one of its caps. Searching by number also works, since the numbers run in order with no gaps in this window.

If you remember a rung but not the caps, open the weekend ladders first if the words were long; otherwise scan the month you played in. Each day page lists every rung, so a quick look confirms whether you have the right ladder.

Limits of this list

The archive begins at #856 on 3 September 2026, the first Crossclimb HintSheet covered, so earlier ladders are not here. Everything above is counted from the window stated at the top of this section and will be recounted as the list grows.

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