Welcome to Decrypting the Cryptic #12! In this series, we’ll be taking apart common cluing conventions used in American cryptic crosswords to build your confidence in solving a puzzle variety that can be, as its name implies, especially challenging. 

A couple of weeks ago, we got into beheadings and curtailments, in which you remove the first or the last letter of a word to get the answer word, or at least to get a string of letters that is found in the answer. Just as you can remove the first or last letter of a word and use what’s left, you can also just…use that letter! Since answer words are never just one letter, this type of wordplay will always be used in combination with some other wordplay type (with an exception we’ll talk about later).

Let’s just dive in with an example:

Example #1: Respectful title: Head of Marketing Driver (5)

The answer is MADAM, which is a “respectful title.” In the wordplay portion of the clue, “Driver” gets you the letters ADAM, as in actor Adam Driver. But what’s “Head of Marketing” doing? The word “head” indicates that you are to take the “head,” or the first letter, of the word “Marketing” and use it to build the answer.

So the wordplay portion of this clue adds up to charades — cluing the first letter in MADAM with “Head of Marketing,” and the rest of the word with “Driver.”

Example #2: Take back micro-bird (3)

The answer is EMU, which is a “bird.” But EMUs are gigantic; they’re hardly micro-sized. What’s going on? As in the first example, the overall pattern of the clue is charades. We’re using the last letter, or the “back,” of the word TAKE. That’s an E. And the Greek letter MU is shorthand for “micro-” in metric measurements. Science! Add E plus MU to get EMU.

There are lots of ways constructors can indicate to you that you’re looking for the first or last letter of a word. Be on the lookout for:

• Words that relate to the top, bottom, front, or back of something: “head,” “cap,” “end,” etc. (“Top,” “bottom,” “front,” and “back” are of course frequently used as is!)
• Ordinals: “first” or “last” (And hey, any ordinal works: If you see “third” in a clue, the constructor may be asking you to grab the third letter of the word instead of the first or last.)
• “Ultimate” (for the last letter)
• “Beginning” and its synonyms: “start,” “inception,” “origin”
• “Ending” and its synonyms: “close,” “finale,” “finish”

I promised you I’d talk about an exception to the rule about this type of wordplay always being used in combination with some other type of wordplay, since cryptic crossword answers, just like standard American crossword answers, must be at least three letters long. The exception is when the wordplay in a clue is telling you to take the first or last letters of each word in a phrase. In that case, you don’t need to combine with another type of wordplay because the same trope is being repeated multiple times.

How’s that work? Here’s an example.

Example #3: Forward, as Thandie Newton Hollywood endings (4)

The answer is SEND, which is a synonym for “forward” in its verb sense. (Remember, the definition part of a cryptic clue need not define the answer with the same meaning as the surface sense of the clue; in fact, it’s better and more fun when the two are different!) If you take the last letters, or the “endings,” of the words “as,” “Thandie,” “Newton,” and “Hollywood,” voila! You get SEND.

Now you’re ready to go forth and figure out some first- and last-letter clues. Don’t forget to check out #crypticclueaday on Twitter! I post a new clue each day using that hashtag (other constructors have been adding their own as well), and every week on #explanationfriday I give the solutions and a brief explanation of how to derive them. These clues are a great way to hone your cryptic solving skills and build your confidence up to solving a full puzzle.

Welcome to Decrypting the Cryptic #9! Unlike my usual posts, today I’m not going to be explaining a particular rule or convention of cluing, but rather helping you figure out when you might be going down the wrong rabbit hole.

Everything I’m telling you presupposes you are solving an American cryptic and that you’re solving a puzzle or clue by an experienced constructor who knows the rules. Brits are allowed certain levels of trickiness that we Yanks are not, and because “the rules” are not particularly well codified, novice and intermediate puzzlemakers may make mistakes that break them. (OH HAI IT ME SOMETIMES)

Rabbit hole #1: Mixing up the straight definition and the wordplay

I’ve seen comments on some #explanationfriday posts that indicate that not everyone realizes that the straight definition and the wordplay in a cryptic clue must always be two discrete components. They don’t mix, at least not in American cryptics. (UK cryptics DO allow mixing; I’m not sure what the rules are for India, Australia, and other more recently colonized countries, but I suspect they’re more likely to follow UK rules.)
So, if you find yourself thinking that the first and the last words of a clue are a charade or anagram components leading you to an answer that’s defined by the words in the middle, stop it! You’re in a rabbit hole and it’s time to get out.

Rabbit hole #2: Can’t decide between two answers

This is one thing common to cryptics in every country, I believe: With all the information given to you, there should never be more than one correct answer to the clue.

This isn’t always true in standard American crosswords — probably the most famous example of all time is the New York Times 1996 Election Day puzzle, in which 39-Across could be CLINTON or BOB DOLE, either of which fit the clue and, amazingly, leading to all seven crossings working with their respective clues. It remains one of the all-time constructing feats in standard crosswords, but it’s not a thing that happens in cryptics!

Cryptic constructors want to be tricky and make you have a hard time getting to the answer — but once you get there, you should be sure it’s the answer. It’s part of the constructor’s job to write the clue such that, given all of the information available to you — including enumeration and, if we’re talking about a puzzle and not an isolated clue, crossing letters — there should be only one way to make everything work. (When making full puzzles, I also try to avoid writing clues in which there are two possible answers that you have to use the crossings to pick from, because that eliminates that entry as a possible foothold in the puzzle for the solver.)

This is why, for example, when I write #crypticclueaday, I avoid placing indicator words in the center of a clue if both the definition and the wordplay lead to answers of the same length. For example, “Low voice sounds evil (4)” is an unfair clue because it could lead to BASS (in which case “sounds” would be the homophone indicator for BASE, or “evil”), but it could also lead to BASE because “sounds” is in the middle and could also be indicating a homophone of BASS.

So, if you are really torn between two answers and you’re solving a puzzle by an experienced constructor, take a step back and look at the clue carefully again. At least one of your guesses is wrong!

Tell me more!

Just two rabbit holes today, but that’s in part because I’m a far more experienced cryptic solver than I am a constructor, and I tend not to get stuck in ways that relate to the rules — so I don’t know what else you guys might need help with! Please leave a note in the comments if there’s a clue you’ve been having trouble figuring out, and I’ll try to be your Clue Doctor and diagnose the problem in a future post, especially if your question indicates an issue with understanding the rules that other solvers might be having.
Don’t forget to check out #crypticclueaday on Twitter! I post a new clue each day using that hashtag (other constructors have been adding their own as well), and every week on #explanationfriday I give the solutions and a brief explanation of how to derive them. These clues are a great way to hone your cryptic solving skills and build your confidence up to solving a full puzzle.

Welcome to Decrypting the Cryptic #8! In this series, we’ll be taking apart common cluing conventions used in American cryptic crosswords to build your confidence in solving a puzzle variety that can be, as its name implies, especially challenging. Sounds like it’s time for homophones! (See what I did there?)

Cryptic crosswords make lots of use of homoNYMs — that is, a word that has two meanings with different etymologies (and possibly different pronunciations). We explored that in the double definitions post. But why stop at homonyms when you can play with homoPHONEs as well? Homophones are words that sound the same, even though they are spelled differently, like BASE and BASS (the latter in its “low voice” sense, not its “food fish” sense) or HEAR and HERE.

When a word is being clued using a homophone, there will always be an indicator of some kind that you’re to sound out what’s being clued rather than taking the clued word directly. (There will still be a direct cluing of the word in the direct definition; this is just in the wordplay portion of the clue.) These indicators can include, but are not limited to:

• A reference to hearing: “I heard,” “in the ear,” “listened to”
• Words about speaking: “orally,” “out loud,” “said,” “recited”
• “Reportedly” and its synonyms
• “On the radio,” “broadcast,” “over the airwaves,” etc.

Now that I’ve told you some common indicators, here’s a simple example:

Example #1: Ram heard objection (4)

The answer is BUTT. The straight definition is “Ram,” or BUTT in the sense of head-butting someone. It’s also a homophone for BUT, which is an “objection,” and the word “heard” indicates that you’re looking for a homophone. And remember how I told you that enumerations are themselves clues? That’s how you know that you’re to look for BUTT and not BUT. (Without an enumeration or a puzzle grid, you’d have to guess, because the indicator word is adjacent to both “Ram” and “objection.”)

Note that, unlike with anagrams, in which the constructor must give you actual words to be anagrammed, NOT synonyms of those words, in the case of homophones the constructor is free to clue a synonym of the homophone. (We can’t go too easy on you — they’re called cryptics, after all!)

The thing about simple homophone examples is that they’re kind of boring. The best cryptic constructors (of whom I do not consider myself one — yet!) are able to string together some pretty elaborate homophonetic (is that a word? I’m declaring it one if it isn’t) phrases that are hilarious when you figure them out. Here’s an example straight Out of Left Field:

Example #2: Revolutionary permitted to be recited — and recited audibly (4,5) (Clue credit: Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto, Out of Left Field #6; subscription required to view full puzzle)

This one’s extra tricky because there are a couple of words — “recited” and “audibly” that could be the indicator. In the end it’s “to be recited” that is the indicator, and “audibly” is part of the definition. The answer is READ ALOUD, or “recited audibly” in the straight definition. But READ ALOUD is also homophonetic with RED ALLOWED, in which “red” comes from “Revolutionary” in the clue and ALLOWED comes from “permitted.”

Homophones aren’t as common as the other clue types we’ve discussed thus far because, as I mentioned, the simple ones are kind of boring and the complicated ones are hard to get to as a constructor. I, for one, have not yet managed to produce a good multi-word homophonetic clue yet, but I’ll build a whole damn puzzle around it and then throw a party when I do.

That explains homophones for ya! Feel free to ask questions in the comments, and don’t forget to check out #crypticclueaday on Twitter. I post a new clue each day using that hashtag (other constructors have been adding their own as well), and every week on #explanationfriday I give the solutions and a brief explanation of how to derive them. These clues are a great way to hone your cryptic solving skills and build your confidence up to solving a full puzzle.

Welcome to Decrypting the Cryptic #7! In this series, we’ll be taking apart common cluing conventions used in American cryptic crosswords to build your confidence in solving a puzzle variety that can be, as its name implies, especially challenging. Today, we’re taking on double definitions.

Back that thing up, because today we’re taking on reversals! In a reversal, a word or phrase is spelled backwards to create another word or phrase. Unlike with anagrams, the exact text to be reversed does not have to be given to you in the clue — a synonym will do, although sometimes you do get the exact letters to be reversed. And there will always be some kind of indicator word or phrase that lets you know that you’re to reverse the order of the letters. Let’s look at an example.

Example #1: Back-end vessels (4)

The answer is POTS (“vessels,”) which is STOP (“end”) spelled backward; the word “back” indicates that you’re spelling something backwards.

Note that the answer must be POTS, not STOP, because the word “back” appears adjacent to “end” (the synonym for STOP), and not adjacent to “vessels” (the synonym for POTS), which indicates that STOP is to be reversed. So note that the clue “End back vessels (4),” besides being more awkward from a surface sense, is also unfairly ambiguous, because the word “back” is adjacent to BOTH “end” and “vessels” — there is no way to tell which four-letter word is being asked for. 

That being said, you may find the indicator word in the middle of a clue when you’re solving a full puzzle; it’s less than perfectly elegant, but not unfair as long as you have crossings that enable you to choose between the two alternatives. The indicator word can also be in the middle if the word to be reversed is given directly in the clue, as in “Flow back to inhale (4)” for WOLF. WOLF here means “to inhale” in the “wolf your food” sense, and the placement of “back” is not ambiguous because you can reverse the word FLOW to get a synonym for “to inhale,” but so far as I know there is no way to reverse any synonym for “inhale” to get a four-letter synonym for “flow.”

There aren’t THAT many words and phrases that reverse neatly into another word or phrase just as they are, so reversals are frequently paired with some other clue type. Here’s an example.

Example #2: Ran back into sore, chaotic situation (7)

The answer is ANARCHY. Again, the indicator word for the reversal is “back.” Turn the word RAN around to get the letter string NAR, which is inserted into the word ACHY (“sore”) to create ANARCHY, a “chaotic situation.” (Remember those containers we talked about?)

Of course, “back” isn’t the only way to indicate a reversal. Here are some other words that should tip you off that you’re to spell something backward:

• Sometimes we’ll just be nice and say “backward” or “reverse [in any of its tenses]”!
• Expressions for turning around, like “turned about,” “about-face,” or “U-turn”
• Clues about going right to left instead of left to right: “turns left,” “go west”
• “Wrong way” or other phrases that indicate that you’ve been given the answer in the wrong direction
• Appropriate gymnastics terms like “somersault” and “backflip”
• Words that indicate backward motion, like “retreat”

Note that when you’re solving a puzzle, you’re going to have some Down entries. In Down clues, you’ll also get some indicator words that I won’t say NEVER appear in Across clues, but are more likely to appear there than in Across clues:

• Indications that an answer is to be printed going up instead of coming down: “up,” “going north”
• Synonyms for standing something on end, like “erect”
• Expressions for turning something upside down, like “inverted” and “flip over”
• Words that indicate ascent, like “climb” and “rise” — because the answer is supposed to be going down, but instead the wordplay indicates a word that’s climbing up

That’s it for reversals! Feel free to ask questions in the comments, and don’t forget to check out #crypticclueaday on Twitter. I post a new clue each day using that hashtag (other constructors have been adding their own as well), and every week on #explanationfriday I give the solutions and a brief explanation of how to derive them. These clues are a great way to hone your cryptic solving skills and build your confidence up to solving a full puzzle.