

The answer to this clue was MARIO BROS., and the four long answers referenced were HORNED TOAD, GEORGIA PEACH, MURIEL BOWSER, and OOPSY- DAISY. For instance, the ApNew York Times crossword had the clue for 34A be "Video game franchise with characters found at the ends of 17-, 20-, 53- and 58-Across". Further, American crosswords generally have a theme, which is generally (but not always) some clever bit of wordplay present in some of the longer answers.

In these layouts, every letter is part of both an Across and Down entry. There are various different types of layouts for crosswords, but here we concern ourselves only with the American layout of crosswords. Many newspapers have one or two crosswords every day or every week. These words are written in two directions, Across and Down, which results in the words crossing, as you would expect. If you somehow don't know what crosswords are, crosswords are a type of word puzzle where you're given a bunch of clues and they have to write letters in the spaces to form words that give the answers to those clues.
