Please use the comments form attached to this page for any general feedback relating to the site.
all about cryptic crossword clues
all about cryptic crossword clues
Please use the comments form attached to this page for any general feedback relating to the site.
Hi Andrew,
I sent a reminder to the Crossword Editor on 18 Feb. to enquire why I hadn’t received my booktoken for the Xmas competition. I suggest you do likewise. It looks like the issue of these prizes was poorly managed. I received my token in response in early March
Regards, Tim A.
Thanks Tim. Which email address did you use?
After getting no reply from the userhelp@theguardian.com address suggested here, I emailed crossword.editor@observer.co.uk. This was picked up by a member of the editorial team who said my email would be passed on, but I’ve not heard anything since.
Surely if you’d emailed to query the non-arrival of your prize and it was dealt with, someone at the paper might have questioned whether ANY prizes had been sent… and are any other winners in the same position as me, fishing around for a way to contact the right person?
None of us, I’m sure, enter for reward, nor are most of us successful often enough that a missing prize doesn’t matter.
I won a 3rd prize recently and the book tokens for that arrived a week later, so I suspect the admin of 2740 is a glitch.
Hi Andrew,
I also emailed crossword.editor@observer.co.uk. It took some 2 weeks to get a reply from a female assisstant (I don’t recall the name and no longer have the reply) and the £25 in booktokens followed about a week later (no bookplate). It seems you will need to persist.
This also happened to me several years ago when I didn’t receive my token for an Xmas Comp. VHC. I let it slide then, but not again.
Regards, Tim
Hi, I was awarded a VHC ‘extra prize’ for Azed 2740 – the Christmas comp for which Azed inadvertently used an old clue word. The slip mentioned that prizes would still be awarded, but I haven’t received anything. Is anyone else on this site in the same position or did my prize somehow ‘disappear’ in the post?
As I understand it, the extra prize in a Christmas competition for a VHC is an Azed bookplate, and not e.g. a smaller value book token.
There have been delays in The Observer sending out VHC bookplates in previous years, and I suppose the change of ownership might have put a spanner in the works.
But anyway, there’s definitely at least one fellow-VHC winner of Azed 2740 here who might read this later and let you know if he’s received anything. 😉
Thanks. I won a 3rd prize for 2746 and that (book token and bookplate) arrived within a week of the results being published, so I can only assume it’s been ‘lost’ in the post.
Back in the day, an Xmas VHC did indeed bring a book token. Harder times now…
Hi Andrew
The ‘extra prizes’ have in the past been a ‘minimum value’ book token and a bookplate, and this year the instructions stated:
“£100, £65, £40 book tokens and Azed bookplates will be awarded to the three clues judged best (which accompany correct solutions to the puzzle). Extra discretionary £25 book tokens will also be awarded for clues judged very highly commended.”
I strongly suspect the extra prizes have been overlooked. I remember the prize issuing in a previous Christmas comp going awry, and I think that the person responsible for prize distribution may simply have applied the standard ‘monthly comp’ scheme. I would suggest an email to userhelp@theguardian.com, unless anyone can offer a more direct mail address.
Hello. I have another suggestion. In the list of letter selection indicators, I think it would be useful to include words that can have the effect of capturing all the internal letters. For example, “contents of”, “bulk of”, “cargo of”, “substance of”. Some of the words currently appearing in the letter deletion list, such as “internally”, “inside”, and “filling of” might perhaps be better placed in the selection list if you were to adopt this suggestion. That would seem more intuitive to me than, as now, grouping them with words such as “frameless”, “limitless” etc, which suggest absence rather than presence.
Thanks, Richard
I entirely take your point, and having what could be considered as letter selection indicators in two separate lists does indeed seem counterintuitive. The rationale which I have always applied, though, is that letter selection indicators must act on a word or words which are in plain view within the clue, while deletion indicators can act on words which are themselves indicated within the wordplay. So ‘heart of stone’ can only be O, while ‘peeled fruit’ could be RANG or EMON [orange/lemons] as well as RUI. I appreciate that some ‘all but first and last’ indicators can logically be viewed as selections and others as deletions, but I want them all to be in the same list, and the overriding factor in determining where they collectively go is the nature of their operand.
I’ve no idea why ‘contents of’ isn’t in either list – thank you for that, I will include it at the next update. I’m not entirely convinced about the others. ‘Cargo’ doesn’t do it for me – a ship without its cargo is still a ship. ‘Substance’ is a bit vague, but it suggests to me something more along the lines of ‘essence’ rather than ‘contents’. ‘Bulk of’ seems fine for last letter reduction, but I’m not keen on it for anything else; that said, I have found a couple of examples of it being used in blocked cryptics for first/last letter reduction, so I’ll definitely add that potential interpretation to the Cryptic Lexicon. But it’s all very subjective, of course!
Thanks for looking at this. I agree that “bulk of” works well for last letter reduction, given the “greater part of” meaning of “bulk” cited by Chambers. As far as the other meanings of “bulk” given there are concerned, “the belly, trunk or body” one does seem to give some support the interior selection function I’m looking for, and I think I’ll give it a go in a clue I’m currently working on. Other possibilities you may wish to consider for interior selection are “body of”, “innards of” and “interior of”.
I can’t imagine solvers being much disconcerted by ‘bulk of’ being used to indicate the interior letters of a word. My personal reservation is that the meaning ‘belly’ would suggest the selection of just the middle letter(s) (‘the deep interior of anything’), and the ‘hull’ sense would suggest the selection of just the outside letters, so applying that degree of transitivity is perhaps going a little too far.
I’m very comfortable with ‘innards’ and ‘interior’ – thanks for those. I’m less sure about ‘body’…
Thank you – I much appreciate the opportunity to discuss these things.
Alas, it doesn’t take anything much out of the ordinary for hares to be let loose on 15 squared.
There is only one thing in cruciverbal life worse than being talked about on 152… 😉
Nice one. How long before they start awarding Oscars, prompting cryptic acceptance speeches?
That would be wilde! Although some of the acceptance speeches are already pretty cryptic.
Good afternoon Doctor Clue.
I was recently musing on first letter indicators and wondered how you felt about Prime, Premier and Chief.
I know your lists won’t be exhaustive, but perhaps those three are omitted for a reason. (I think they could work when following a possessive-s, but they aren’t particularly versatile.)
Hi CG, and thanks for the suggestions. My thoughts below:
Prime. I’m very comfortable with this as an adjective, with the sense of ‘foremost’, so ‘prime piece of beef’ for B works for me. Chambers gives one sense of the noun as ‘the beginning’, but it seems typically to be used in a temporal sense. I’ve found one example in a VHC Azed clue (“Azed’s prime” for A), and another in a blocked puzzle, but it’s clearly not in common use. It does strike me, though, as being rather similar to ‘onset’, which is a regular in AZ comps. As you say, it isn’t very versatile, so I’m inclined to include it in the Lexicon but not in the Letter Selection list.
Premier. Again, the adjective is fine, but perhaps not all that useful. The Chambers definitions of the noun don’t offer any encouragement (nor do the OED’s defs), so I fear I must give “number’s prime” for N the thumbs down.
Chief. Once more, it strikes me as being absolutely fine as an adjective, eg ‘chief element in brass’ for B. The noun doesn’t quite convince me, however, and I can’t immediately find any examples of its use in published clues. I think ‘leader’ better conveys a sense of being first in position and not just importance.
The etymologies of all three are encouraging, but I do think that the range of meanings of the nouns are considerably more restricted than those of the adjectives. I wouldn’t be entirely comfortable using any of the nouns myself, although I don’t think solvers would have any problem working out that ‘chief of staff’ led to S or “France’s premier” to F.
Thank you, that all seems sensible.
While I’m here, another non-versatile word, this time a containment indicator, that probably isn’t worth adding to the main list is stay/s/ing. “Hold, restrain, check the action of” in Chambers. I think I’ve seen it before, but perhaps only once.
“… staying with…” might be nice for an inserted w, for example.
Cheers!
I think that’s a cracker!
The passive form may not be too useful (though ‘stayed by the sea in France’ is pleasingly deceptive), but the active has real promise. Something like ‘Performing pooch stays at home’ for DOING, say. I shall add it to the containment/insertion list at the next update. Thank you.
Incidentally, it’s a word that still (many, many years on!) puts me in mind of a passage from the prologue to Bored of the Rings: ‘He would have finished Goddam of there and then, but pity stayed his hand. “It’s a pity I’ve run out of bullets” he thought’.
Nice one! Those are very good examples.
Bored of the Rings takes me back. One of the earliest examples of a commercially successful parody, I think. Ten a penny now.
Hello Dr Clue.
A couple of questions
1. Could there be a case for including “negotiating” in the list of containment/inclusion indicators – under both headings? One of the meanings of “negotiate” given in Chambers is “to pass safely over, round, through etc”. So, if “A is negotiating B”, the meaning “A is in the process of passing through B” (and is, therefore, currently “within” B) could perhaps justify inclusion of A in B. Replacing “through” with “round” could perhaps justify containment of B in A.
2. Have you considered “broaching” as an insertion indicator?
I’d be grateful for your thoughts on these.
Hi Richard, and thanks for your suggestions.
Taking your points in order:
1. Not for me. I wouldn’t dispute that in certain situations, eg negotiating a maze, containment could be inferred contextually, but the same could be said of rowing a boat – we can visualize the activity and therefore make many deductions beyond what is stated or implied by the words themselves. Even if a clue said ‘barge negotiates tunnel’, I don’t believe that the solver could be expected to see this as indicating insertion – a context established in the surface reading has no bearing on the cryptic interpretation. I would view verbs like ‘navigate’ (‘to sail, fly, etc over, on or through’) or ‘travel’ (‘to journey over or through’) similarly.
2. I’m much happier with this one! There is a clear sense of piercing with ‘broach’. I do have some concern that in the active form the subject is not the thing which is piercing the object, rather the agency responsible, but that applies to quite a few generally-accepted containment/insertion indicators, including the very similar ‘tap’, which has I think been in the list since day one. It seems entirely fair to the solver, so it gets a ‘yes’ from me, and will be included at the next update.
I stress that, as always, the views are my own. That said, a check on George Ho’s database shows that while inflections of ‘broach’ were used by setters for containment/insertion in the clues that he sampled, inflections of ‘negotiate’ were not.
Hope that helps!
Many thanks, as ever, for your helpful analysis. I find your site to be an extremely useful resource for clue-setting. Thank you so much for all the hard work you put into maintaining it.
Your comments are very much appreciated – thank you!
What do you think of Frankenstein as anagrind?
“transitive. To assemble (disparate or ill-matching parts) to form a whole in a manner resembling the creation of Frankenstein’s monster; to create or construct in this way.”
Also “mutant”?
Thanks, Johannes
Yes, ‘mutant’ (as well as mutates/mutating/mutated) seem absolutely fine to me. They’ll be added in the next update.
‘Frankenstein’ isn’t given as a verb by Chambers or Collins, so I’m afraid I have to disqualify it as far as the lists go, although I’m sure that solvers would work out what was intended by “Introduce Frankensteined being” or the like.
Ah interesting, you try and avoid relying on meanings that are in OED but not Chambers?
Indeed – there is no guarantee that all entries in the lists will be accepted by UK crossword editors, but it’s pretty much certain that any word not given in mainstream single-volume dictionaries will be rejected by them. Solvers have to be able to validate words, including the relevant meanings, using readily-accessible references. The online Collins picks up any neologisms (eg ‘nepo baby’) or modern usages (eg ‘gaslight’) which Chambers hasn’t caught up with.
Hello Dr Clue
A quick query on the Juxtapositions page. It used to be the case that three successive sorts of the data resulted in the Before’s being listed in two groups – Across and Down – and the After’s similarly. Now, whatever combo of sorts I use, I can only get groupings of either Before/After or Across/Down with the items within each group being muddled up. Has there been a change to your algorithm – and could it be returned to the state it was in?
Many thanks, in advance for any response, and generally for the very helpful resource that these pages provide.
Hi PM, and thanks for your comments.
I haven’t changed any sort parameters – perhaps a Table Press update resulted in things working differently. Anyway, after a crash course in DataTables, I have added a couple of commands to the controls for that table. You should (fingers crossed!) find that if you sort on ‘Before or After’, the resultant hierarchical order will be Before/After, Across/Down, Indicator; if you sort on ‘Across or Down’, you should get Across/Down, Before/After, Indicator.
Let me know whether it’s now working as you would hope.
Splendid job, Dr Clue. Now working better than ever.
We aim to please 😉
Hi,
Great site! As well as Azed 2,500 this year, it’s the 80th anniversary of Ximenes 1. Have there ever been any blog posts about the Ximenes competition winners? I think it might be fun to revisit some of these, to see how they hold up, 80 years on.
In some cases it might be tricky to parse them at all. I note the winning clue for CAT-LAP from Ximenes 1 was “Once round the tiles for a drink” and the “explanation” was “i.e. a lap for a cat”.
Even if the “Ximenes competition clue archeology” idea doesn’t catch on, can anyone please help me understand how that clue works?!
CAT-LAP: I don’t think there’s much more to it than cat-lap meaning a weak drink, and the traditional saying of a night on the tiles being derived from cats on rooftops mating and fighting and making a racket. Any cat who makes a round trip on a night of doing that is whimsically completing a (cat-)lap.
Hi Zithery, and thanks for your comment (your name immediately made me think of Shirley Abacair, which says something about the way my mind works!)
Yes, it looks like 24th June is the day. Although the first Ximenes puzzle was published in 1943, his ‘new style’ puzzle was launched in 1945, and the numbering restarted from 1. An image of the puzzle can be found on the Crossword Centre’s blog; in puzzle 778 (December 1963), Ximenes produced a puzzle with the same grid and answers as the first puzzle, but with some clues ‘modernized’; apparently no-one noticed, which is, frankly, hardly surprising. Both versions are to be found in ‘Ximenes and the Art of the Crossword’; the first one certainly supports the assertion that, in the land of the crossword at least, ‘the past is a foreign country’.
For quite a while the &lit site used to tweet a randomly-selected clue from the Azed and Ximenes slips every day, which neatly illustrated the (gradual) change in standards. sadly, the site is currently unmanaged and the posts are no more. But the winning clues are all there in the &lit archive, and it would be good to give some of the best ones an airing. That CAT-LAP clue isn’t among them, not by today’s standards at least – I can’t add anything to CG’s explanation.
Ah, Thanks, Doctor Clue & CG for the analysis and the link to the original Ximenes 1 grid. I’ll have a closer look at that.
re: CAT-LAP: Seems as though I was looking for some cryptic depth that wasn’t there…
re: Shirley Abacair: that clue might not have held up well but Shirley has. 94 and still going! 14 when Ximenes 1 was published…
Blog posts on the “best winning competition clues down the ages” might still be a goer?
Hello,
Thank you for maintaining such an excellent website. Internet domains as indicators for various countries seem to be included in your database inconsistently or are they not internet domains but something else altogether? For example, I see CH for Switzerland and DK for Denmark, but not NO for Norway, RU for Russia, or RW for Rwanda. I do see these abbreviations listed in dictionaries such as Collins.
Also, will C for Charles and CR for King be included at some point?
Many thanks.
Thank you, Dromedary, and welcome to the blog
The reference for all the abbreviations is Chambers, and the country codes are IVR codes as given by that dictionary, so Norway is N, Russia is RUS, and Rwanda is RWA. Chambers doesn’t give country code TLDs, so they are not included. I have long entertained the hope that the editors of Chambers would review and update the abbreviations, since there are some obvious omissions (S for small and L for large, for example) as well as a few that could do with being retired, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I have two problems with adding non-Chambers abbreviations to the list: (i) they are likely to be rejected by barred puzzle editors, and (ii) where do I draw the line? I am certainly minded to add small, large, live, neutral etc to the Lexicon, though, if not the main list.
Thanks for the monarchical prompt! I have added CR for ‘King’, ‘the King’ and ‘King Charles’, and changed ER to ‘the old Queen’. I’m not sure what the justification for Charles = C would be (Charlie is ok, of course, being part of the NATO phonetic alphabet); I don’t think that Elizabeth was previously valid for E. Is it something that you have seen used in puzzles? CAR for Charles is given by Chambers.
Good evening Dr Clue
Is there a way to search this site for keywords? I’ve been having a debate with A N Other tonight about the bidirectional expulsion/deletion nature of ‘avoid’, and I somehow think that you and I have exchanged comments on this, but I can’t find them.
Thank you (and also for resurrecting my border collie a fortnight ago).
Good evening Monk
The answer at the moment is ‘no’, but I have been looking at adding a site search facility.
That said, I was able (as the administrator) to do a search of all comments for ‘avoid’, and nothing relevant turned up. I don’t remember discussing the topic, but that doesn’t prove anything!
Personally, I’ve always felt pretty comfortable about ‘avoid’ being bidirectional. The two current meanings ascribed to it by Chambers are (i) ‘to evade, escape’, which clearly suggests departure of the subject, and (ii) ‘to shun, shirk’. The Chambers Thesaurus observes in its ‘nuances of synonyms’ for ‘avoid’ that “The word shun implies ignoring that which is to be avoided, whereas abstain from has more to do with not taking part.” That indicates to me that expulsion of the object is possible. In ‘I avoid the Christmas party’, the party goes on but without me; in ‘I avoid the manky sprout’, I go on, but without (and perhaps due to my avoidance of) the manky sprout.
Good evening Dr Clue
Just chanced upon a minuscule cosmetic typo in the “last letter” subgroup of the Letter Selection list, which contains “what’s behing this = S”. Prob best to correct this asap otherwise children across the land will be shouting “It’s behing you!” at the imminent Xmas pantos.
Thanks, Monk
Is it fixed now? Oh yes it is!
😆 Just wondering why my avatar on the first posting in this latest thread is no longer my lovely border collie? Has the server/protocol changed?
There was a slight problem with the spelling of your email address on that particular comment – I’ve adjusted it, and the border collie is back 😃
Hello Dr Clue
Just noticed that the internal timestamp on the Drag and Drop lists is still showing as 27-11-23 (31 entries) rather than 21-10-24 (37 entries). I couldn’t post this comment using the non-public interface as no AntiSpam question appeared therein in my Firefox browser.
Thanks, Monk
Looks like I’d closed the browser accidentally when there were unsaved changes pending. Thankfully (since I’d updated the introductory text as well as the change history), WordPress had an autosaved version , so all should now be well.
Hello Dr Clue
Thank you for your ongoing sterling efforts in maintaining this excellent site. One (so far) of the most recent updates struck an immediate chord as it arose in a puzzle I recently solved. It concerns the addition of ‘drains/draining’ as deletion indicators. The clue I saw obtained ‘[Letters for a bottle] minus [letters for a man]’ from the wordplay ‘Bottle man drained’. Notwithstanding the minimalistic crosswordese, surely “Bottle man drained” leaves not “bottle minus man” but rather “bottle and man, with the contents of the former now transferred [to the man/sink/floor/A N Other/etc]”. Presumably this is why you didn’t include ‘drained’ in the list?
Hello Monk
Most kind, thank you.
I agree completely with your analysis of ‘Bottle man drained’. I included ‘drains’ and ‘draining’ on the basis of the intransitive meaning of the verb, but (as with something like ‘disappear’) only compounded forms can be used in an ‘unpaused’ construction – ‘colour drains from face’, ‘face drained of colour’ – with the uncompounded verb only working in something like ‘face, colour draining’. I wouldn’t use ‘face, colour drained’ or ‘face, colour disappeared’ myself, but I can see that the transitive senses of the two verbs make the judgement on them marginal.
Hello Dr Clue
It’s often the case with so many of these apparent complications that simply adhering to normalspeak resolves any ambiguities. In your examples, ‘face, colour having drained’ or ‘face, after colour has disappeared’ would be 100% soundly parsed. I wonder if such ambiguities arise predominantly in sound-SR-driving-iffy-CR clues?
I’m sure you’re right, and I suspect that it’s often the quest for the smoothest possible SR that tips the CR over the edge.