In an NY Times puzzle from November 1996 some of the clues had two answers.
(Many or most of you have seen this crossword before, but it still seems worth a link.)
Quite the opposite, in fact. Boring puzzles (to me at any rate) are simple one-to-one definition or fill-in-the-blank puzzles. The types of puzzles you get in your in-flight magazine or with a cheapo “100 Crossword Puzzles!” book you buy at the gas station/travel plaza are almost always of this type. These are tedious and boring to do.
A good puzzle is one that has a nice balance of a few “gimme” clues or clues with one unambiguous answer to get you started, along with ambiguous clues, thematic clues, wordplay/punnery clues, etc. You know, the “fun” clues. You always have to be on your toes with the NYTimes and make sure you consider all possible meanings of the words in a clue. And sometimes, they’ll get really tricky on you: for example, one clue from way back when had the word “numbers” in it, but with the meaning of “numb-ers,” i.e. those who numb. (The answer had something to do with dentists.) That’s the stuff I love.
Or the greatest example of a crossword with clues giving multiple answers (and perhaps the most clever American crossword ever composed) is the 1996 Election Day Puzzle. If you don’t know about it, it’s really worth reading through that page. Incredible puzzle.
ETA: Great minds think alike. Beaten to the punch by septimus.
One of the standard things like that in British puzzles is the word “flower.” Very often used to refer to a river name in a clue.
Oh god yeah, if you see the word “flower” in a cryptic clue, think rivers, not roses and daffodils :D. I guess it crops up a lot because river names are useful in clue construction. There are other examples - the aforementioned “number” crops up occasionally but is probably less useful. One I particularly like is “supply”, which as well as its usual meaning can be taken to mean “in a supple manner”.
Another source of “a-ha!” moments in crosswords is when they use a word that’s the same in (say) the past and present tense in a clue, and you just can’t make anything fit, until you realize they’re using the other one.
Hey! The OP bloody is not unfamiliar with NY Times crosswords. I do have the app after all. That doesn’t mean they don’t piss me off sometimes.
Anyway, in this case, knowing conventions was a detriment because the convention is that “one” means a person, and “it” means a thing. That’s not a fixed rule of course, but I think they were intentionally bucking that convention to make the clue harder.
It still might have been fine if wristwatch had popped into my head right away. However, I first thought of guard, but because of the question mark started looking for someone that could be a guard in special circumstances. Then I started thinking of someone that would keep the time … in a race? a game? a music recital? So, that’s my fault for not thinking supply enough … my brain’s definitely number than it used to be!
I liked this recent NYT clue:
“He married He”. Three letters.
Hint: starts with “M”
Answer: Mao (his third wife was named He Zizhen)
That actually seems somewhat pertinent, as to my mind the OP’s clue’s major failing is faulty grammar. I can’t think of any use of “One doing x” in which ‘one’ refers to a unique inanimate physical object that’s also consistent with crossword puzzle grammar.
To explain the ‘unique’ part:
- One lying there is my phone.
- *One covering the pot is the lid.
In 1, there could be other objects lying there, so “one” works. Not so with 2. There can’t reasonably be more than one thing simultaneously keeping a wristwatch on someone, so the clue is incorrect as well.
Maybe it’s common in other dialects of English, but I’d have to see evidence of that.
It’s as if you were given the clue “Him who is in the kitchen”. Few would have trouble understanding what that means, but unless it’s a quote or something tricky like “He married He”, it’s faulty English.
My girlfriend is one of your sort. We do the Sunday NYT puzzle in bed together and her feathers get ruffled when I jump to the first obvious fill-in that I see and start working from there. Just to keep peace I’ll usually stick to her obsessive ritual, but in my view the numbers are strictly a way to map the clues to the field.
Which way do you hang your bog roll paper?
A good crossword clue will have more than one answer that will fit in the space, often sharing letters (such as CLASP and STRAP). A good crossword puzzle isn’t supposed to be easy.
I just guessed CLASP by reading the tooltip in the new posts list. When I read the post, I assumed there would be some clue as to the number of letters in the word, but there wasn’t.
The first thing that sprung to mind was something having to do with a wristwatch. I would’ve done the easiest of 1-5 down to fill in at least a couple of letters before deciding if it was STRAP, CHAIN, or CLASP.
I do my crosswords in ink, so I don’t fill anything in unless I’m sure.
It would have never occurred to me that people actually try to do crosswords in order. That’s silly. And, as stated above, kind of impossible with a good crossword where there will be multiple possible answers to any given clue. Is “Citrus fruit”, four letters, LIME or UGLI? No way of knowing unless you try out some of the cross words. I mean, isn’t that the whole point of this type of puzzle, to be simultaneously working on across and down clues in tandem to find the correct solutions? I posit that a crossword designed such that it is probable to solve using only one direction of clues is a badly written puzzle.