USA TODAY® 9-Minute Crosswords

With their clever, inventive wordplay, these diabolically fun stumpers will have solvers chewing their pencils right down to the nub! Every one of Richard Silvestri’s crosswords features a little something extra: the themes, and many of the clues, contain homophones, sneaky double entendres, letter shifts, transposals, and other linguistic tricks designed to delight canny conundrum fans.

And, for an extra challenge, puzzle addicts can time themselvesÂ…and see if they can beat the clock by whipping through each crossword in nine minutes flat!