The Odds and Ends of Accent Marks

Have you done this week's crosswords?

Subscribe The Daily Beast Crossword is where power, pop culture, and politics intersect—quite literally.   Designed to be more challenging throughout the week, you can test your knowledge with five puzzles each week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday. Play This Week's Puzzles Get in the Game With Matt Gaffney There's an accent mark on the E in "Khloé Kardashian," who was 1-Across in Thursday's puzzle. The media is pretty good about using that accent mark most of the time—but what about crossword writers?     We generally ignore accent marks in grids, since the crossing word would need to use it as well. For example, the É in KHLOÉ could have been crossed with, say, the É in ÉMILE, as in the French novelist Émile Zola, using the accent both ways. Indeed, puzzles have been written using this accent-marks-works-on-both-words idea, but generally speaking the accent marks are ignored in puzzles.    This generally doesn't bother solvers, with one notable exception: the N-tilde in Spanish. The letter is such a part of familiar Spanish words like MAÑANA and SEÑOR/A that demoting it to N-no-tilde status seems a bit odd. There's also annoyance from some Spanish-speaking solvers when the word for "year" is used in crosswords, which it frequently is. The word is "año," which you may recognize from "Feliz Año Nuevo," which means "Happy New Year."   But written as ANO in the grid, without the tilde? Well, that's the Spanish word for "anus," which isn't something everyone wants to write in over breakfast.    What's your favorite crossword entry word with an umlaut, tilde, or accent grave? Tweet it to #beastxword and you'll look über-cool. Play This Week's Puzzles © Copyright 2021 The Daily Beast Company LLC  555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011  Privacy Policy If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, click here to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can safely unsubscribe.