Island Hop with This Week’s Crossword Puzzle

Have you done this week's crosswords?

Manage newsletters 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 You'll find lots of islands in crossword puzzles, and we had a bunch of them this week: Brooklyn's CONEY Island on Monday, Spain's IBIZA on Wednesday, Florida's Key LARGO on Thursday, and an 8-letter Caribbean island on Sunday (which I won't mention here in case you haven't solved it yet).    Why so many islands in puzzle grids? Because there are so many around the globe, often with short, vowel-rich names, and these names tend to come from many different languages, which gives unusual (for English) letter combinations that are highly useful for puzzle writers.   Taking a quick global tour: Hawaii alone gives us very handy MAUI, LANAI, KAUAI and OAHU, and the Pacific also yields GUAM, FIJI, and the island nations of TONGA and SAMOA.    Moving westward to Asia we get BALI and SRI LANKA, then up to the Mediterranean for CRETE, ELBA, MALTA, and KOS.    Finally, we'll cross the Atlantic to find frequent puzzle guests CUBA and ARUBA in the Caribbean. And hey, those two even rhyme!   Got an island you'd like to see in a puzzle? Tweet it to #beastxword and we'll make it happen. But keep 'em short — MARTHA'S VINEYARD won't fit in one of these grids. 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.