Solving tips

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Expect the unexpected

The long and the short of it

Try the short words first

• Italian rivers: Try the Po before the Tiber.
• Composers: Forget Beethoven and Rachmaninov. Remember Elgar, Ravel, Ives and above all others, Thomas Arne (who wrote Rule Britannia).
• Ancient cities: Forget Persepolis and Babylon. Think of Ur and occasionally Thebes.

Short clues

Two-word clues are extremely likely to be double definitions.

Short and long answers

Short words are much easier to write hidden word clues for than long ones. Long words or phrases are quite often clued by anagrams.

Crossword "facts"

ion = charge

CE = church

EC = city

Cryptic Crossword conventions

Me and you

Down clues

'Your' or 'Ones'?

Phrases you know with the word "your" in may appear with "one's" instead, such as KEEP ONE'S HAIR ON. If you try building a few grids, you'll soon find out how much easier it is if ONES is used. If the answer is such a phrase and the SI works for both versions, look at crossing answers, but expect ONES rather than YOUR about 19 times out of 20.

Things to ignore

Punctuation

Spacing and hyphenation differences

Tense

The wordplay in clues usually works in the present tense, e.g. "Nothing stops Chelsea playing tie" for SHOELACE=tie - O=nothing in anag. of Chelsea, with a subtle "insertion indicator" - "stops" as in stopping a tooth. (Watch out for imaginative indicators like this, especially at the Times, Guardian and Independent.) If the clue had "stopped" or "will stop", the logic would be just the same. As the clue is written several months before you solve it but (obviously!) read when you solve it, and you can think of the wordplay taking place at the time of writing or the time of solution, any of the tenses make sense. Present tense is the norm, but you'll see future or past occasionally because they improve the surface reading or are needed to make the wordplay fit.

Apparent phrases

Be grid-centric

• One of the habits shared by many crossword solvers is to cross out the number of each clue as the clue is solved.  For standard cryptic puzzles, I recommend ditching this habit. If you use number deletions to draw your attention to the clues which aren't solved yet, try looking at the grid instead. Blank squares there are just as conspicuous as undeleted clue numbers, and the grid entry includes the clue number.  If you look at the grid first, you can see any letters already provided by intersecting answers. Often these can give you strong hints about the likely answer, or eliminate some wordplay possibilities. This only works, of course, if you take care and ensure that only the definite answers are written in the grid.
• Another habit shared by many solvers is tackling the clues in numerical order. You can speed things up on your first look at the clues by looking at intersecting down clues whenever you solve an across clue. This means you have to keep a mental 'thumb' somewhere in the list of across clues, so that you eventually check them all. You can gradually refine this method so that you ignore down clues that you've already looked at, or ones that won't provide any checking letters for later across clues you haven't seen yet. Exactly how you exploit checking letters is up to you - looking at one corner of the grid at a time may suit you better than my method described above. Some people (apparently including the late John Sykes who won the Times Championship almost whenever he wanted) will tell you that you should start with the last few down answers, because the setters run out of ideas when they get close to finishing, or that 1 Across is always difficult. I don't believe any "fact" like this is true often enough to change from starting at the top left.
• If an answer has more than one word, it's often useful to mark the word breaks in the grid. You can thicken the bars at word breaks (blocked grids only!) or use small hyphens where they're shown in the enumeration.
• If you find that long answers are sometimes quite easy to solve, it might be worth looking at all the long answers first - an answer to a 15-letter word will give you some information about 7 or 8 others.  The word lengths in multi-word long answers can give you some hints about likely words - 3 letter words are quite likely to be THE or AND, and "2,3" sequences may be OF THE.  In "Jumbo" puzzles, you may find cases like "F_E_D_F_....." (5,2,3,5,2,4) - if the phrase "FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD" comes to mind, you can be pretty sure that it's the only one with the right word-lengths that fits, and not worry too much about what the clue says. In 15x15 puzzles there are some multi-word answers that get used a lot and can be spotted quite easily from the word-lengths and part of the def. Examples: TITUS ANDRONICUS (hardly any other well-known (5,10) play), ON TOP OF THE WORLD, MIDDLE OF THE ROAD, A DROP IN THE OCEAN.

Clues joined by ... ellipses

Sometimes, the two clues overlap. For instance, you may need to use the first one or two words of the second clue as part of the first one. I can only recall seeing one pair of clues where both extended past the ellipsis into the other member of the pair.

At the time of writing, Guardian setters seem to be running an unofficial competition to see who can join the most successive - If you see sets of three or more clues with ellipses, the third and later clues in the set may continue from the first clue, not the second.

The initial capital letter trick

Most cryptic clues, like English sentences, start with a capital letter. This simple fact is often exploited by setters. Sometimes they use it to avoid emphasising the initial capital letter of a word which is a proper noun, by using that word as the first word of the clue. Sometimes they do the opposite, and place an ordinary noun at the beginning of the clue, because they would like you to think it is a proper noun.

Find your definition

A major part of the task of solving a cryptic clue is correctly identifying the definition. Remember that nearly all (I'd guess at least 95%) of clues have a definition which starts at the beginning or ends at the end of the clue. If you're stuck, try interpreting the first or last one, then two, then three, (etc. etc.) words as a possible definition, and see if you can make sense of the rest as wordplay. In most puzzles you can use a lazier method and just try the first or last one or two words - one of these choices will often account for at least 80% of the definitions.

Have you made a mistake?

Brackets in 'cryptic logic'

Remember the principle in mathematics, that calculations in brackets are done first, so that 3+(4 times 5) = 23 and (3+4) times 5 = 35 ? Some cryptic clues require you to work out where their 'brackets' are.

The transition from learning to instinct

When you're a beginner at cryptic crosswords, you need to think about most clues very carefully. Gradually, you'll learn to recognise bits of cryptic jargon and some of the words which often imply a particular clue type. You'll also remember particular clues and recognise them when you see them again, whether in the same form or a slightly different version.

After a while, what you learn will enable you to solve some clues "instinctively" - you'll just read the clue and see what the answer is, with very little conscious thought. If you see people solving cryptic puzzles very quickly (say 5 minutes for a daily newspaper puzzle), much of their solving will be done in this way. This causes problems when an "expert" solver tries to explain how to solve cryptic puzzles - their chief method of solving doesn't work very well until you've been doing cryptic puzzles for quite a long time. The expert can usually tell you why the answer to a cryptic clue is the right answer, but you can be pretty sure that this explanation has little to do with the thought processes that led him to that answer. It is usually "him", despite the stuff in the Guardian (25 June 1999) about brain mapping, which reckons that "women are better at processing complex verbal information". Perhaps cryptic clues are actually "simple verbal information"?

	The bad and the ugly
	Clue Types
	YAGCC Contents Page
	Other material about cryptic crosswords on this site