Welcome to The Clue Clinic – where people interested in solving or setting cryptic crosswords come to learn, sharpen their skills, and get expert guidance from experienced setters.
If this is your first visit, we would recommend visiting the About This Site page to get some ideas about the areas of the site which may be of particular interest to you and the ways in which you can interact with Clinic staff and other readers.
What’s New
The PDF of the latest Gemelo puzzle is available at this link: Gemelo 42 The PDF of the latest Azed puzzle is available at this link: Azed 2,781 The June Digest is now live, providing a short round-up of news and views from the Clinic. As of 16th June a number of improvements have been made to the Clinical Data table display. See the Refurbishment Project Status page for details.
Latest Posts
Latest Comments
I’m always embarrassed by the number of Scottish words – more of a thing for Azed, it feels – of…
Thanks, Iain – your second vote will have replaced the first one, so all is good. In 16d the first…
You can remove my 2 rating if you like. It occurred when I was grubbing around with my mouse, not…
Hi Alastair. For me, another challenge is that I have never heard of at least 50% of words in an…
Thanks for the link, Jim. It may well be considered cheating but I am only an average crossword solver and…
It does, thanks. I was increasingly questionning the I at the end but only because it’s not a common last…
There’s no doubt that one solver could have found Gemelo 41 significantly more difficult than Gemelo 42, while another could…
Alastair: You might consider it ‘cheating’ but if you open: https://chambers.co.uk/puzzles/word-wizard/ and enter a?atura?ei it gives you the answer. Only…
I found this one of the more difficult ones. Not many anagrams to get started with, and quite a lot…
Hi Alastair The answer is a (1,6,3) Latin phrase, an anagram (‘bats’) of RETAIN plus the answer to 21a (’21’),…