LinkedIn Crossclimb #713 Answer & Analysis

🧠 Expert Logic Walkthrough

Tackling the clue ___ and fortune (widespread recognition and success) triggers an immediate connection to a classic English idiom. My brain instantly fills in the blank with "FAME and fortune," which perfectly matches the required four-letter count for the grid.

For the clue No longer wild, as an animal, I need a four-letter adjective describing domestication. While "pets" came to mind first, it's a noun. The exact descriptive word for breaking a creature's wild instincts is TAME, locking in our second derivation.

Moving to A shopping basket icon might symbolize it online, e-commerce terminology dictates the answer. When you shop on the internet, you add your items to a digital CART, giving us another easy four-letter solve.

Next up is What you pay a taxi driver. "Toll" applies to roads and "cost" is far too generic. The specific, four-letter term for a transit or cab fee is a FARE.

Finally, for Feel sympathy, the definition points toward an emotional response. To feel deep sympathy, concern, or compassion for someone else is to CARE.

With the five core words established—FAME, TAME, CART, FARE, and CARE—I need to sort them by changing exactly one letter at a time. Grouping the rhyming endings makes this easy: CART morphs into CARE, CARE shifts to FARE, FARE transitions to FAME, and FAME changes to TAME. Now, I look at the theme hint: "The top + bottom rows = A hyphenated word for a type of job that may be worked only a few days per week. Keep in mind: The first part may be at the bottom." The hyphenated job is clearly "part-time." Testing the ladder connections, placing PART at the top perfectly connects to CART (swapping P for C), and placing TIME at the bottom links beautifully with TAME (swapping I for A).

Expert Summary: Solving this puzzle was a fantastic exercise in recognizing suffix patterns. The shared "-ARE" and "-AME" word endings heavily dictated the central flow of the ladder. Once the rhyming pairs were grouped together, the core sequence essentially built itself, leaving the clever hyphenated hint as the perfect bookends to lock the entire board into place.

🔍 The Word Ladder