puzzlerzone
What The Daily Headlines is
Each day you receive five real New York Times headlines pulled from the paper's archive. Your task is to determine the publication year of each one, using clues in the wording, subject, and historical context. The archive spans from 1900 to the present, so any headline could come from any point in more than a century of news. Scoring is based on closeness: you do not need to name the exact date, only a year near the truth, and each headline can earn up to 1,000 points. The better your estimate, the higher your score for the day.
How to play
Read all five headlines in the daily set. For each one, enter your best guess for the year it was published. After you submit all guesses, the puzzle compares each answer to the correct year and awards up to 1,000 points per headline based on how close your guess is. Because scoring rewards proximity, broad knowledge of twentieth- and twenty-first-century news is more useful than memorizing exact publication dates. A new five-headline set appears each day, and the game requires JavaScript to play.
Tips
- Headlines can come from any year between 1900 and today, so pay attention to language and tone; older news writing often sounds noticeably different from modern headlines.
- A close guess scores better than a blank answer, so use every hint in the headline—names, places, events—to narrow down the decade.
- Remember that each daily set contains five headlines, and a single headline can earn up to 1,000 points, so a near miss still helps your total.
Common questions
How many headlines are in a daily puzzle?
Each daily issue contains five real New York Times headlines taken from the paper's archive. You guess the publication year for each one and receive a score based on how close your guess is.
Do I need to know the exact date a headline ran?
No. Scoring is based on proximity rather than exact answers. Each headline can earn up to 1,000 points, and the closer your guess is to the real publication year, the more points you receive.
What time period do the headlines come from?
The archive material runs from 1900 to today, so the daily set can include headlines from any point in that range. Modern news and century-old stories are both possible.