I read an essay once on the difference between British and US crossword clues.
US clues tend to be more “fill in the blank” or trivia driven in their clues. According to the essay(I’ve never done a puzzle from a British magazine or paper) British clues had more plays on words.
For example, “major city in Washington state” would be an American clue. “Lets eat sloppily in a mariner’s port” would be a British clue. Of course both have the same answer.
The difference in clues is connected to the difference in grids. In proper American crosswords, you can never have unchecked squares: Every square will be part of two different words, across and down. So even if there’s one clue that’s ambiguous, you can still solve the puzzle.
In British puzzles, though, around half the squares end up being unchecked. So you can’t necessarily rely on the grid to resolve ambiguities, and so all of the clues themselves have to be unambiguous. The easiest way to remove ambiguity is to effectively clue each answer twice, so that if you get the same answer to both, you know you’ve got it. And it’s best for one of the two clues to depend on letter-play, for words which can be spelled with two different vowels or the like. But giving two clues for each word would make things too easy, if the clues were like American ones, so they have to make the clues trickier.
I disagree. I’ve been doing American crosswords at least three times a week for a couple of decades now, and have never seen one in which every square was part of two words. Most of them, certainly, but not all by any means.
Could you give us an example of a puzzle you’ve done that had unchecked squares?
And these particular words (epee, Uma, olla, ogee, Esau, une etc.) are always needed because they are short and they have specific vowels as the first as last letters.
I imagine the puzzle writers have a computer program with a repertoire of these words and it just plugs them in automatically.
True, but in the UK crosswords, less than half the squares show up on multiple clues, and you things like a four-letter word (across) that only contains one letter for a down clue. You don’t find that in US crosswords (at least, not the ones for adults).
Yep. You can find the British style here, if you look for Cryptic Crosswords. I like them much more than American-style crosswords, since I suck at trivia but am pretty good at wordplay. And YoDoc, either you haven’t been paying attention to the crosswords you do, or you’ve been doing the ones in Highlights for Children: the “each letter is in two words” tradition is pretty much universal in standard American crosswords. See here for a bunch of examples; see here for a New York Times puzzle.
If a puzzle has 1 or 2 letter answers I skip it.
Similarly, “Mrs. Chaplin” (OONA) and “Yoko” (ONO).
I’d see such puzzles (usually a two-letter answer, with one letter hanging unchecked) in publications like TV Guide.
Could you tell us where you see such crosswords? As LHoD says, in virtually all US crosswords every square is part of two words. I can’t recall seeing any with single-word boxes except maybe in a high-school newspaper.
I know what you are referring to when you say knots. However, I still get these, and I rarely do anything other than NY Times Sunday puzzles. That is frustrating, when you can’t even get a hint by getting a few letters from the surrounding words.
NY Times, as most puzzles, have a theme. The worst themes are the ones that are a famous saying.
Like the clue for the first part of the quote is
14 Across - First part of quote
33 Across - Second part of quote
.
.
.
100 Across - End of quote
Thanks a lot, guys. I don’t mind a challenge, but you have zero chance to make a dent in the puzzle until you get all of the down clues around the quote.
Yeah, I hate those too.
My favorite Brit-style clue (which I didn’t figure out, however) was “How to make Aunty jaunty”, 8 letters.
popinjay
I tried to find an example. I thought “well, I’ll just pull up the Chicago trib and that’ll shut em up.”
Nope. I was wrong. Unchecked squares are indeed rare. I don’t know what I was thinking.
I’m not sure about that clue. Where’s the definition?
I quite like this one:
(8)
which could probably work in an American puzzle too, at least an NYT-style one.
clueless
I was quite annoyed by yesterday’s Guardian cryptic, which required me to identify a movie by knowing it’s (clued) lead actors.
Although in my limited experience, British crosswords tend to be looser (for lack of a better word) than American Cryptics. For example, the clue given by Senegoid in Post #33 wouldn’t be kosher in an American Cryptic Crossword, which requires each clue to consist of two parts (one a relatively straightforward clue and the other typically based on wordplay).
I don’t think that clue would fly in the major UK broadsheet crosswords. Definitely not in the (London) Times. Maybe in the Guardian, some of their puzzles are “loose”.
British cryptics do include a style of clue that is not seen in US cryptics, in which there’s no wordplay, just a definition with a misleading surface reading. Such as
A non-stop flight? (9)
ESCALATOR
I don’t know about American cryptics, but clues like that are quite common in standard American puzzles. Though of course I can’t think of any examples right now.
No strict definition, but for anyone who’s (ahem) clueless, here are the two ways to get the answer:
[Spoiler]1. A popinjay (foppish person) could cause Aunty to become jaunty (buoyantly self-confident).