CLEVELAND — Veteran crossword constructor Marguerite Ostrander-Bligh confirmed Tuesday that every puzzle she has published since 1987, roughly 11,400 grids across eleven publications, has been built around a single eel.

“Yes, it’s the same eel,” Ostrander-Bligh said in a statement she read from her front porch in the tone of a dental hygienist. “It is three letters, it is vowel-rich, and it fits almost anywhere. I assumed that was understood.”

The disclosure followed a post by a retired actuary in Dayton, who noticed that clues such as “Slippery swimmer,” “Elongated fish,” “Moray, e.g.,” and “Electric ___” had all led, over four decades, to the same E-E-L in the same emotional position in the grid.

“I’ve been finishing Thursdays on the strength of that eel,” said solver DennisHarkaway, 58. “Every time I got stuck, I’d think, ‘Well, there’s the eel,’ and the whole southwest corner would open up. I thought it was a coincidence. It was a dependency.”

Ostrander-Bligh declined to say whether the eel has aged, noting only that “eels don’t age the way people assume.” She said she has never met the eel and does not know its name, though she described the relationship as “professional, warm, and one-directional.”

“I never claimed it was a different eel. No one ever asked.”

Experts say the confession, while jarring, is not unprecedented. “Every constructor leans on a crutch. ERA, ORE, ALOE, ETUI,” said Dr. Teodor Wuthering, senior fellow in Short-Fill Dependency at the Lindqvist Institute for Grid Studies in Duluth. “But to rely on one specific eel for thirty-eight years is not a crutch. It is load-bearing. If you removed it, a lot of Saturdays would simply collapse.”

Puzzle editors reacted with something between relief and fatigue. Bram Kettlewick, crossword editor of the Tri-County Gazette-Dispatch, said his staff had always noticed the eel. “We assumed it was a different eel each time,” he said. “That was a comforting thing to believe. Honestly, one eel is more manageable. There’s only one to vet.”

Pressed on whether other recurring entries, including ERIE, OREO, and ARIA, might also be the same ERIE, OREO, and ARIA, Ostrander-Bligh said those were “separate matters” that she would address “in the spring, at a time of my choosing.”

Solvers have since begun reexamining old puzzles for further patterns. Early findings suggest that a surprising number of grids also contain an ASEA, though experts caution that this is a different problem and probably the fault of everyone.

Ostrander-Bligh said she has no plans to retire the eel, calling it “the best three letters I have ever worked with” and noting that it has “never once asked for a byline.” She added that this Saturday’s puzzle will be eel-free “in the sense that you’ll have to find it.”

At press time, the eel had not commented, which Ostrander-Bligh said was “very much in character.”