Solution to Filler Puzzle

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Answer: OREO O'S

by Anderson Wang, Ashley Kim, Azalea Weisblat, Jon Schneider, and Patrick Yang

We're presented with a series of 78 images, split into two sections. We start by identifying them. Eventually, based on the words' high concentration of Es, or by recognizing certain words, we realize that this is a puzzle about crosswordese, or words that appear a lot in crossword puzzles.

We can then proceed to solve this diagramless crossword as we would any other, treating the first set of images as across clues and the second set as down clues. The answers are as follows:

Across
1ETA
4ERG
7AEON
11OONA
13RUM
14RENE
15ERTE
16EPA
17ALOE
18ENE
20ENTRE
22SELENE
25BARA
27ASTI
28LST
29ENO
32YENS
35ESTOP
37AROD
38ESNE
39OREOOS(unclued)
40RIME
41SEIS
42ANION
43EPEE
44SRA
45ATE
46LIES
48CURE
50TSETSE
52VERSO
54EEG
55STUN
57LIV
59NERO
62SELA
63OLE
64ESPY
65ETAS
66EEE
67TIL
Down
1EOE
2TOR
3ANTES
4ERE
5RUPEE
6GMAN
7ARARAT
8EELER
9ONO
10NEE
12AENEAS
19ELS
21TBSPS
23ETERNE
24NISEI
26AERIE
28LOONIE
30NOME
31ODE
32YSER
33ENIAC
34NES
36TOOLS
37ARP
38ESS
39OATER
43ESSENE
45ARENAS
47ETE
49UVULA
50TOILE
51EGEST
53SLOE
55SSE
56TET
58VEE
60RPI
61OYL

We fill them into the grid:

crossword solution

The center entry of the puzzle, which is unclued, is OREO OS, a cereal named for a crossword constructor's favorite cookie. Thus, the answer is OREO OS.

Authors’ Notes

We initially tried many different extractions for this puzzle, including hiding pairs of OREO cookies diagonally in the puzzle and extracting the "filling" between them, and making oreo-shaped arrangements of black squares. However, none of them ended up allowing us to get as crosswordese-dense fill as this simple extraction did, so we went with this approach.