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Verifying Theme Uniqueness

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teger:
Can anyone explain to this newb how to verify the uniqueness of a theme?

The reason I ask is because last night I was solving some puzzles in a book I had recently purchased. One of the puzzles I happened to be solving was a 15x15 themed puzzle with three 15 letter theme answers. To my horror, the three theme answers were exactly the same as a puzzle I had authored about a month ago.  Granted, the grid was different, the fill was all different, and all of the clues were different.

I am not accusing someone of using my theme. To be fair, the puzzle I was solving was created about five years ago.

Having been working crossword puzzles for decades, I cannot say that I definitely had never come across this puzzle before. But nevertheless, it leaves me a little shaken that perhaps I need to be doing more work to ensure my themes are unique.

It's pretty easy to research clues and answers. But entire themes?

And, by the way, I did put my puzzle into the XWordInfo analyzer and one of the theme answers came up as being unique. Well, unique to NYT anyway. So that made me feel pretty good about it. Until now.

Needless to say, I am a little stunned and would love to know what others do to ensure theme uniqueness.

Thanks

mmcbs:
Crosswordgiant.com is my preferred source, because it carries puzzles other than just the NYT and LAT. When you get a hit on a theme entry you can click over to the entire list of clues and entries in the puzzle and pretty quickly determine if the theme is the same.

teger:
Thanks for the tip. Interesting, I did that last night and found another puzzle from 2003 with the same theme. Don't know if it was the same constructor who had later recycled the theme.  But at least I learned something useful. And also that with eleventy gazillion crosswords out there it's takes time and effort to avoid overlap.

I am not an expert on relational databases. But something that would be really cool would be if crosswordgiant.com (or some other) would support a query of four or more answers at one shot. Then present the results in a grid in order of puzzles that used all or most of the answers down to the ones that used the least.

In that manner, a constructor could query an entire theme at once to see if the theme is used elsewhere.

Thanks
 

mmcbs:
Depending on the nature of the theme and the actual entries, there are situations where one publisher might use a theme that has been done before. For example if its a set of four things that would be very commonly associated with one another, and just about anyone might think them up, then the use of that set might not be construed to be plagiarism. On the other hand if there is a certain uniqueness to it, that's another story. If you'd be willing to share your theme with me via the message utility on this web site (or by email at mcclain.salem@gmail.com, I'd be glad to comment on the specific sitiation.

admin:
Hi,

I've been thinking of adding a multiple word option for some time now. You could put in, say, RED + WHITE + BLUE and get all puzzles that have all three appearing within thematic entries. It's doable. I'll post something when it's added as a new feature.

-Kevin

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