The Jumble is two puzzles in one. First you unscramble a handful of words, four on weekdays and six on Sundays. Then the letters in the circled squares become the pieces of a final answer that fits the cartoon. The first part is plain unscrambling. The finale is where the real puzzle is.
You do not need every scramble to start on the finale. Solve the ones that come quickly, copy their circled letters down, and let the finale fill in the gaps. Sometimes a half-solved finale tells you what the last scramble has to be. If a scramble has two answers, try the one that gives the finale the letters it seems to need.
The answer blanks tell you how many words there are and how long each one is. Count your circled letters against them: if you have fewer letters than blanks, one of the short words is probably printed on the page for you, often A, THE or IN. Quotation marks around the blanks mean the answer is a single word split across them, and a hyphen means the answer really contains one.
The answer is almost always a play on words about the cartoon. It might swap in a word that sounds the same, as in BYE NOW, PAY LATER for “buy now, pay later”. It might bend a familiar saying, as in SAME AULD SONG for “same old song”. Or it might split one word in two, as in OVER CAST for a rainstorm over the actors. Read the caption, think of a common phrase that fits the scene, and then look for the twist.
With the letters in hand, try to place the longest word in the answer first, since fewer words of that length can be made from your letters. What is left over is a smaller, easier scramble for the short words. Common endings like -ING and -ED are good places to start, just as they are in the everyday scrambles.
The Jumble solver unscrambles each word and ranks likely finale answers. Type the answer shape the way the page shows it, including any printed words, such as 7 the 4, and add the cartoon caption if you want it to help choose between close answers.
