Clinical Data – April 2025 Update
Whenever I make changes to the lists, I now update the change history on each of the relevant pages, so I don’t routinely issue consolidated summaries.
Having done several updates in February, many of them prompted by suggestions from readers, I have made further additions this month, at the same time deleting the duplicated anagram indicators dithering, dithers and dithered. The various inflections of clamp (a strange omission) have been added for containment/insertion, as has instilled with. The departure/expulsion indicators formed from vacate are new entries, as are the reversal indicators derived from up and chop (the latter as an advanced indicator, based on the Chambers definition of the transitive and intransitive verb chop2, “to change direction”). The first letter selection indicator earliest and the juxtaposition indicators faces, facing, and faced with have been included. I don’t routinely add anagram indicators unless I feel that they provide something different from those that are already listed, given how many of them there are, but this month I have included devised, made a mess of, disposal of and volatile (the first three of which I had reason to use in clues of my own).
I very much welcome suggestions from readers regarding additions, deletions or modifications to the lists. Anything that I’ve actively rejected for the main lists will be in the Lexicon with a ‘questionable’ marker, so something that can’t be found in there has probably not even received consideration. The only things that I don’t include are indicators which seem highly unlikely to appear in clues, such as ‘inarming’ for containment, or anagram indicators which seem to offer no significant advantage over those already listed, eg ‘tumultuous’. Even allowing for that, I have no doubt that there are still plenty of cryptic indicators missing, so if you see something that isn’t listed used in a puzzle, or you think of a word/phrase that you feel has claims for inclusion, do let me know.
