Listener Crossword: Statistics
History of the statistics
Near the end of 1975, The Listener
magazine carried an announcement
that the most successful solver in the following nine months would be invited
to meet the setters at their Dinner in 1976.
(In the event, four solvers were all-correct and all received an invitation.)
Full checking, record-keeping and notification of the results
commenced soon after this exercise, with No 2397 (7th October 1976),
under the auspices of Michael Rich, the crossword’s first statistician.
Soon after becoming an Editor for the series Michael passed the mantle to John Green, who commenced his duties in 1985–86 and is still in post. John has maintained the overall procedures established by Michael, but has developed and enhanced them in the light of experience. Solvers are offered, each year, a set of documents that contain their own individual records, with each error detailed, as well as:
- A list of each puzzle, with the number of entries, correct and incorrect, new solvers (for the year) and number of currently “all-correct” solvers.
- A list of “Common Errors”, in part to help prepare the individual records, but enabling readers to indulge in a spot of schadenfreude.
- A ranked list of the leading solvers, ie, those who achieved no more than 10 incorrect or unsolved puzzles.
- A “triangular table” showing the number of solvers who had correct solutions to m puzzles out of n submitted, for all possible m and n.
- A report on the annual Dinner that has just been held.
- Miscellaneous, eg, historical or address distribution, data if there is room spare. (Postal rates restrict the bundle to eight pages plus personal record.)
John is an active solver who therefore has direct experience of attempting each puzzle. He is also able to be tolerant over late submissions, but only if good reason has been reported in advance, eg, absence on vacation, provided, of course, that the submission is dispatched prior to the publication of the solution (on Friday evenings by the Times Crossword Club).
In 2005 all versions were converted to electronic format, which involved some corrections and reformatting. An account of this can be read HERE.
Documents by year
All the documents associated with the Annual Statistics are available as PDF files, for each year, HERE.
The lists of ‘Leading Solvers’ have been reduced here to only those who were ‘All-correct’ for each year. This is for reasons of privacy. Also, the postal districts for these solvers have been removed.
The following collates the numbers of solvers who failed on
between 0 and 10 puzzles in each year;
it also gives the total number of individuals who submitted
at least one puzzle in each year.
TABLE: numbers of solvers for each year
Submission data
A single file including the submission data for every puzzle from No 2397 to the end of 2014, suitable for input to a spreadsheet program, can be accessed HERE. It may be best to save the file and open it outside the browser. To do so, Right Click on the link above, then “Save Target As…” wherever convenient.