Meet the UNC student behind the DTH crossword

“Wait, can you make a Harry Potter-themed one?” Laney Crawley, editor-in-chief at The Daily Tar Heel, asked Liam Furlong, The DTH's crossword creator, in the office one day.

“Absolutely,” Furlong replied. “Here, I'll bookmark that.” 

Furlong has been making crosswords since the end of his senior year of high school after he didn't have a ride home from school one day and had to sit in his AP English Literature and Composition teacher's classroom until he was picked up.

To kill the silence in the room, Furlong's teacher asked if he wanted to learn how to make a crossword puzzle. At the end of their session, they had made a 5-by-5 puzzle — Furlong was hooked.

That summer, he started making more puzzles, increasing their size, and after a few months at UNC, Furlong realized he wanted to do something more with his newfound hobby. 

“I said, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a weekly puzzle made by a Tar Heel for Tar Heels about stuff that pertains to Tar Heels?’” Furlong said.

Prior to 2022, when Furlong published his first crossword, The DTH went through a content agency for a random puzzle to include in the entertainment section of the paper, making them less personal to the UNC community.

Since Furlong reached out to The DTH two years ago, weekly puzzles with UNC-related clues have been published in the paper.

Sarah Monoson, print managing editor for The DTH, said, “I think having our own personalized crossword helps contribute to the sense of community because it establishes us as a real newspaper, where we're having someone make crosswords that are, a lot of the time, specific to UNC.”

Even when Furlong has an extra busy week and less time to make a crossword, Monoson said he still takes the time to send over an older puzzle so that the paper can be sure to have one.

The crosswords can take Furlong between four to six hours to complete, and he typically follows a similar formula when creating the beloved puzzles.

When getting ready to start a new puzzle, Furlong turns on some music to get in the mindset. He often starts with a theme, which can usually result from conversations like the one with Crawley, or just things that are relevant at the time. Once the theme is established, Furlong creates three or four larger answers known as “seed words.” He then builds around these words, making black spaces and finding filler words to ultimately complete the puzzle.

Finding a theme and building words around it is Furlong's favorite part of the whole process. He realizes that there are so many words to be used, and finding out how to play with them in different ways creates diversity in his set-in-stone routine.

“I think that's a cool thing about making clues,” Furlong said. “You have to learn a little about a lot of things that could potentially be really interesting, and I think that goes hand-in-hand with wanting to be a writer.”

Furlong is a double major in comparative literature and Hispanic cultures and literature, and after graduation in the spring, he plans to move to the Midwest for a few years and pursue his ultimate dream of being a writer.

Though he might not continue to pursue making weekly crosswords after graduation because of how time-consuming it is, Furlong has noticed how the skills he uses while making his puzzles have translated to his writing, and vice-versa.

“I definitely look at words and their structure and how people use them a lot more intentionally,” he said. “That's not necessarily a sexy answer, but I think I'm a lot more playful with words in my writing than I would be without being able to make clues every week.”

Furlong's dedication to the craft is unwavering, in large part due to the impact he knows they have on UNC students. During his sophomore year, Furlong received an email from two exchange students who said they were stuck on one of the clues in the puzzle. He helped them and learned that the two became friends because they would do the crossword together every Wednesday, often with other exchange students who all got together just to complete Furlong's creation.

Monoson said that she also knows some people who get the paper just to do the crossword, and she said she hopes that when doing this, they read some of the news too. 

Molly Cassidy, a junior at UNC, said she once picked up a copy of The DTH to read a story her friend had written and noticed a crossword in the back, so she started doing it.

“I like that it was a lot of stuff that I knew because some of it was Chapel Hill-related and UNC-related,” she said.

She said that it solidified The DTH as a real newspaper, encompassing both hard news and entertainment — all thanks to Furlong.

“I think it just makes it so special that we can get it from someone who's a UNC student, and that you could walk into class and be like, ‘Oh that's the dude who makes the UNC crosswords,’” Monoson said. “I think that's awesome.”

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