Welcome to Decrypting the Cryptic #15! 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. 

This will be the last Decrypting the Cryptic post for a while. Not because I’m tired of writing them, but because I’ve now explained to you almost all of the rules and conventions that I know.

I’ve been waiting and waiting to tell you guys about &lit. clues. Why? Because they’re the most elusive of creatures, the hardest for a constructor to come up with. I have a feeling that one does not sit down and write an &lit. clue; rather, an &lit. clue comes to visit you, like a bird stopping by your bird feeder IF you’ve chased all the squirrels away AND you’ve filled the feeder with the very finest suet AND the weather is perfect AND the bird damn well pleases. I was hoping that by the time I was ready to write a post about them, I’d have come up with one.

…I haven’t. So you’ll all have to be content with examples by other people.

What, then, is this mythical beast? “&lit.” is short for “and literally.” What that means in the context of cryptics is that unlike all other clues, which can be broken into a straight definition portion and a wordplay portion, &lit. clues can be read in their entirety as both at the same time. Often, but not always, an exclamation point at the end of the clue is placed to indicate its &lit.-ness.

Here’s what that looks like:

Example #1: Schmear spread a bit at a time! (5,6) (Clue credit: Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto, Out of Left Field #5, by subscription only.)

The answer is CREAM CHEESE, which you could say literally is a “schmear spread a bit at a time.” So, the entire clue serves as a way of literally describing the answer. But the clue can also be read as wordplay: SCHMEAR is a letter bank for the phrase CREAM CHEESE; that is, all the letters for CREAM CHEESE are found in the word SCHMEAR. That means that if you “spread” the letters in SCHMEAR “a bit at a time,” you get the phrase CREAM CHEESE.

Note that in this clue, the exclamation point is indeed an indicator for an &lit. clue; “Schmear spread a bit at a time” is just not a phrase one would be expected to shout with emphasis in normal parlance. However, exclamation points are not always indicators for &lit.; if the surface sense of a normal two-part cryptic clue would work with an exclamation point, the constructor may add one.

Let’s try one more &lit. example:

Example #2: I’m a leader of Muslims! (4) (Clue credit: Guardian puzzle #23892 by Rufus; heard through Crossword Unclued)

This brilliantly simple clue leads to the answer IMAM. An IMAM could tell you, literally, “I’m a leader of Muslims” by way of definition. And if you take the first two words in the clue — I’M A — and add the first letter of the word “Muslims” (“leader of Muslims,” get it?), you get IMAM.

Hope you enjoyed these uncommon &lit. sightings, and if you’re a budding cryptic constructor, I wish you an &lit. of your own in the not-too-distant future. Hell, I wish one on myself! 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 #14! 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. 

I’m running out of actual rules to explain to you guys — in fact, the only big one I can think of that I haven’t done yet is the &lit. clue, which is a beautiful thing but difficult to achieve for a constructor and therefore not very common. So, we’ll save that one for next week. Instead, we’ll look at something constructors need to do a lot, which is to indicate a single letter of the alphabet in some way. That letter might need to be added to a word, be dropped from a word, play in a game of charades — but no matter what, it’s boring and not very cryptic simply to give the solver that letter. So here are some ways that we do that.

• If a word has a common single-letter abbreviation, then the whole word might be used in the wordplay to clue that letter. For example, on your bathroom faucet, the hot and cold taps may be marked “H” and “C”; thus, “hot” and “cold” are often used to indicate those letters in cryptic wordplay. Other examples include:
  • “Win” and “loss” for W and L
  • “Runs,” “hits,” or “errors” for R, H, or E
  • “Left” and “right” for L and R
  • “True” or “false” for T or F
  • “Yes” or “no” for Y or N
  • “Male” or “female” for M or F
• The NATO phonetic alphabet: “Charlie” for C, “tango” for T, etc.
• Elemental symbols (not limited to single-letter symbols, of course): “oxygen” for O, “potassium” for K, etc.
• Other common math and science abbreviations and symbols
  • “Speed of light” for C
  • “Time” for T
  • “Force,” “mass” and “acceleration” for F, M, and A
• “Nothing” and its synonyms (“zero,” “nil,” etc.) for O, since O looks like a zero
  • “Love” is also frequently used in this way, since love is zero in tennis!
• Letter grades: “good” for B, “average” for C, “poor” for D, etc.
• Abbreviations for units of measurement
  • “Second” for S
  • “Meter” for M
  • “Gram” for G
• “Fork” for Y (get it? Ys are shaped like forks!)
• Roman numerals: “ten” for X, “five” for V, etc.

Now that I’ve thrown a big, but not comprehensive, laundry list at you, here are a couple of examples to practice:

Example #1: Full minimum stream (4)

The answer is FLOW, or “stream” (either in the verb or the noun sense). A “minimum” is a “low,” so the single letter being clued here is F — which is “full” on your gas tank.

Example #2: Opera article comes after terrible cost (5)

The “opera” being clued here is TOSCA. “Terrible cost” leads you to anagram the letters in the word COST to get TOSC. What “comes after” that is the last letter in the word, A, which is an “article,” as in an indefinite article in the grammatical sense. (Thus, “article” can also be used to clue the letter strings AN or THE, just not this time.)

Hope you enjoyed our exploration of the cryptic alphabet, 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 #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.