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Echolocation

ANSWER: PIN NUMBER

Authors: Charles Steinhardt and Jeremy Horowitz

There are 8 down answers which are acronyms whose common usage often redundantly includes the word which their last letter stands for (ISBN number, SALT talks, ATM machine, LAN network, IRC chat, IRA account, LCD display, and RAM memory). As an aid to identifying these answers as significant, the clue for ACRONYM is “IT is one”, and the eight down answers in question each have clues starting with the word “it”.

Each of these answers has a circle directly beneath it. Placing the redundant word for each answer as a new entry beneath the answer (i.e. with a grid space in between), but as if the grid was blank, then reading the letters in the circles in the order of the down clues spells BANK CODE in the order of the clues. (If you insist on using the circle for IRC chat to extract a second letter from SALT talks, which is not intended, you get BANK’S CODE, which is close enough for our purposes.) A term for a bank-issued code whose common usage often redundantly includes the word the last letter stands for is PIN NUMBER.