James Whitlock

James Whitlock is a senior word puzzle editor with a deep focus on the daily puzzle format. He has covered 7 Little Words by Blue Ox Family Games since 2020, building and maintaining the complete archive of every daily puzzle and bonus puzzle from that year to today. Every answer on this site — all 14 clues per date, across both the main puzzle and the bonus puzzle — carries James’s personal verification.

7 Little Words is a deceptively elegant puzzle format: seven clues, each answered by combining exactly the right two or three letter-chunk tiles from a shared pool of 20 tiles. The format was invented by Blue Ox Family Games and has remained remarkably stable in its core design since launch, with the daily difficulty modulation being the primary variable James tracks in his coverage. He maintains a difficulty index for each calendar year, noting which dates produce unusually tricky clue combinations versus which are accessible to casual solvers.

One of the challenges of covering a daily puzzle game is the sheer volume of output. Blue Ox publishes a new main puzzle and bonus puzzle every single day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. James has been documenting this output since January 2020, which means the archive on this site represents well over four years of continuous daily verification. He is also responsible for the clue search tool, which allows players to search the full archive for any clue text and instantly retrieve the answer — a resource that is particularly useful for players who remember encountering a specific clue weeks or months ago.

James brings a linguistic eye to his puzzle coverage. He pays close attention to how Blue Ox crafts clue phrasing — the way a clue can be technically accurate while still misleading players through misdirection of tone or context. He notes clue patterns in his verification workflow, which helps him catch instances where the published answer might match more than one reasonable interpretation of the clue.

Outside of his editorial work, James is interested in the history of word puzzle formats and the crossword revival in American newspapers during the mid-twentieth century. He sees 7 Little Words as part of a broader contemporary democratisation of word puzzles — a format that retains the intellectual challenge of traditional crosswords while removing the barrier of needing extensive cultural or trivia knowledge.

James can be contacted through the contact page. He reviews and processes correction requests for both the daily archive and the bonus puzzle database, and welcomes feedback from players who notice discrepancies between the site and the live game app.