I’m pretty decent with solving the NY Times crossword and very good with the LA Times crossword. So, a couple of weeks ago I attempted crosswords in some UK newspapers when I was there a couple of weeks ago. I felt as hopeless as a newborn in nappies! I’m pretty good with my across the pond vocabulary but the clues left me stumped.
and I’m going to try to learn to solve these types of crosswords.
Any suggestions on the numerous cryptic crossword books I should buy? I was thinking of The Times but I’m open to others. Anyone else from the USA that has successfully learned to master these types of crosswords?
Mods: I had no idea if this belongs in IMHO, the Game Room, or maybe even the Cafe. Feel free to move.
When I was in England, I attempted their cryptics, but my problem was I wasn’t familiar with their local topics, so I had no chance of cracking most of their clues.
Mainly, remember that the definition part of the clue is either at the beginning or end, and the rest of the clue can be several different types.
Anagram - one or more words in the clue can be rearranged to form the answer. Indicators are words like “mixed,” “confused,” or something that indicates disorder.
Container - the answer is the clue itself, and may be backwards. Indicators are “found in,” “located in,” or words that indicate you look for something.
Reversals - the answer might be a synonym in reverse. Words like “go back to” or “from the bottom” are indicators
Homophones - the answer sounds like the same word, but is spelled differently. Usually indicated with projecting sound, like “report” or “oral.”
Initial letters - might be a group of words in the clue whose first letters are the answer. Indicators include “beginning of” or “start of.”
Mixture - these are the most annoying. Sometimes the answer is an anagrammed synonym. Use thesaurus.com and anagrammer for these. Sometimes it’s one initial letter + anagram + synonym all joined together in some order for the long answers.
I’m reasonably good at doing them, but I strongly advise you to get American cryptic crossword books. I have the first three volumes of London Times daily crosswords (which I bought in 1980) and some of the answers I don’t understand even after I look them up. American ones I can do all of pretty consistently.
I had a friend from New Zealand who grew up with cryptics, and he had a hard time with the UK ones.
The New Yorker for a time published some simple ones, which have been collected.
But the cheapest used one I see on Amazon is $34!!! (New starts from $111). So not worth it. But if you see one in a used bookstore, grab it.
Aside from that any American collection will do. They all give hints.
There is a type of cryptic called variety cryptic, which has an additional twist. Games usually has one of them. Stay away from them until you get really good at the normal ones.
If you really want to do British ones, you might look for some helpful reference books. Chambers dictionary is the official source of words, and Chambers published something called Chambers Words which has all the words in their dictionary sorted by length and then in alphabetical order. Useful if you construct a word and want to see if it is real. I have an old Chambers dictionary I picked up in Cambridge and a book for anagrams, which had words sorted by length with their letters in alphabetical order. There are also finishers which let you look up words where you know a few of the letters.
All these are pre-Web, there are probably Web resources that do all this now.
GAMES magazine has a guide to solving cryptics that is available online here or as a PDF.
There’s a “free daily cryptic crossword that’s not too difficult” available here, but IMHO not all clues are as easy as the description might lead one to believe, and unless I’m missing them there aren’t explanations of the solutions.
Basically, each clue in a cryptic generally (there are exceptions) consists of two parts – a definition and a description (sometimes the description is a second definition). One is at the beginning of the clue and the other is at the end (though which one changes).
Verbs like “change,” “around,” “ruined,” “bad,” “out,” and any verb the implies disorder, like “wrecked” or “destroyed” means that there’s an anagram.
Words like “inside” mean that the actual word is in consecutive letters within the clue. “Half of” can mean part of the word. “Endless” means the first or last letter(s) (or both) are dropped. If “Spooner” is part of the clue, you can swap the initial sounds of the two words. “Return” or “back” indicate you spell a word in the clue backwards.
“Heard” or “sound” indicates that the definition sounds like words in the clue (e.g., “Heard wrecker mend asians endorsements” indicated “recommendations” – say “wrecker mend asians” out loud. The puns are often very broad. “Endorsements” is the definition.).
The Daily Mirror has a daily cryptic online that’s a good place to start. It’s British, so you have to be aware of the different spellings, but it’s small and relatively easy.
I used to like the puzzles published in The Atlantic by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon until that magazine stopped carrying them. It appears they got picked up by The Wall Street Journal, because there’s an archive of a few years worth of their puzzles here.
Maybe this is just Cox and Rathvon, but their clues have words that reduce to one letter in the answer. So something like “runs in the family”, runs might reduce to the letter R, like you’d see on a baseball scoreboard. Hot or cold might reduce to H and C (like on water taps), failed, average, or excellent might reduce to F, C, and A (like letter grades in school), and probably quite a few more.
The UK Guardian offers “quiptics”, which are much easier than the standard British cryptic (which they also have). You don’t have to be a paying subscriber, but you might have to register (for free). Quiptic | Crosswords | The Guardian
A lot more. Directions, for instance. British puzzles use U for upper class. Plus they can get strange - middle of the night might refer to “g” - the letter in the middle of the word night.
I’ve seen a paper a long time ago about a computer program that composed cryptics. (In a British journal, of course.) When an AI can solve cryptics, I’d really be impressed.
I wish the OP luck in his attempt to learn how to do cryptics. My Grandmother could do them, and even though she tried to teach me (I’ve been doing crosswords for years, and love the NYT Sunday puzzles), I couldn’t get the hang of cryptics. As a solver of regular crosswords, I admire those that can do cryptics.
On the other hand, Grandmother never could do diagramless puzzles, which I could, so I guess it all evened out.
That’s pretty standard – clues pointing to the first or last letter, or “undressed” meaning remove the first and last letter. Or “oddly” meaning use the odd numbered letters in the word or phrase.
Here are some examples from the London Times puzzle I’m working on now.
1A. Novelist about fifty? Not quite.
Answer: Nearly. Fifty in Roman numerals is L, so the name of the novelist goes around it. There is an Irish novelist called Neary, but this is a case where you pay attention to the definition: “not quite” since there are zillions of 5 letter novelists.
24D: East gets left standing - that’s a figure of speech.
Answer: Trope.
East is E. Left is port. East gets Left means port comes after the E, so we have Eport. Standing means, since this is a down clue, that you read it bottom to top, so reverse it and get Trope.
Some don’t have this kind of break down, and are just wordplay.
18A (8). There is some humanity in him, no doubt.
Answer: Cannibal.
And here is a simple anagram
17D: Given an order, possibly I tend to be submissive.
Answer: obedient. Anagram of “I tend to be” signaled by possibly.
None of these ones are particularly British, except for the first since the author might be better know over there. I googled “author Neary” to check.
There are different styles, but for the ones I usually do you really need to break up the clue. They are written like a little sentence that almost makes sense, and leaves you puzzling over what it might mean. That’s a deliberate trap. You have to look at the individual parts. Think about which end is the definition end. Look at the individual words. Maybe in the clue, it’s used as a noun, but it could also be a verb. Words that look like they go together might be completely separate. Ignore punctuation. Those commas mean nothing and are just there to distract you.
This is a bad clue IMHO, since Neary is obscure enough that I’ve never heard of him/her. A cryptic crossword should be a test of wordplay and not of general knowledge. It shouldn’t require knowing about people, places, or things that aren’t familiar to most people.
Also a bad clue IMHO, since it doesn’t follow the two-part rule.
In my experience, American cryptics are more scrupulous about both of these things.
With a regular American-style crossword, you can’t always know if you have the right answer to a clue until you see if all the crossing words fit; but with a cryptic, if and when you figure out the clue, it should be obvious that you got the correct answer.
I wouldn’t want to argue with constructors from the London Times. My point was that a lot of clues from actually puzzles don’t conform to the rules you see in the prefaces of puzzle books. The cannibal clue is more like one you’d see in the Puns & Anagrams puzzle that runs periodically in the Sunday New York Times, and seems perfectly legitimate to me. Neary might not be nearly so obscure if you lived over there - 37 years ago or more - as she is now. There are lots of rugby team clues that are probably simple for them. Ditto for us - being a New Yorker “Shea” is an answer I’m well aware of.
American cryptics - outside of Games and the Times - went through an upswing ten years ago or so, but have now pretty much vanished. I suspect lots of crossword fans bought the books, were totally confused, and never bought another, twickster confirmed once that they didn’t sell. Pity. So anyone wanting to do a lot of these would need to understand the British version.
The ambiguity of American regular crosswords is proven by the famous one, right at election day, which could be solved as either Clinton or Bob Dole (I believe) being elected.
