“It’s like making crossword puzzles,” she wrote. The setter’s job is to put up a fight, but let the solver win, with a completed grid and a happy expression.Īgatha Christie once reflected on clues in a whodunnit. Remember: a decent puzzle has some easy clues, strategically placed, to get things going – and the harder clues must all yield eventually. A baffling puzzle is easier to set and much less satisfying to solve. You’ll have no difficulty finding technical tools online, but you might find you make it too hard. Once you’ve acquired the habit, you might be tempted to create a puzzle yourself. It’s also worth solving with a friend – like any language, it comes more easily through conversation. The cryptic-curious are often aware that puzzles will demand anagrams and acrostics, and despair of ever knowing what to look out for.īut the conventions are few and easily picked up the Guardian site has a Cryptic crosswords for beginners series. It’s in its wordplay that the cryptic becomes an art form: “Natty, elegant and trim, primarily (4)” asks you to look at the words’ first letters very NEAT.

The moment of enlightenment is a mental hit – a compulsive one. In a cryptic, a “Number of people in a theatre (12)” can be an ANAESTHETIST: a different kind of “theatre”, and “number” as one who numbs. The cryptic crossword, however, takes this to brain-bending new places. These ambiguities become part of the fun of crosswords, where “Press (4)” leads to URGE as neatly as it does to IRON. In the wake of countless immigrations and invasions, and later, as the empire borrowed and stole from around the globe, the English language became a unique jumble, where any given thing might have different names, and any word might mean many things.

The British quick is a different beast: it’s a linguistic workout – and one that only works in English.

Open a crack crossword clue