I got hooked to it, when the kids' section of our local newspaper (The Hindu), in the town where I grew up ran a section on crosswords in the that explained the different types of crossword clues, with a mini-crossword in tow. It piqued my interest, and I started solving those clues. When I could not get a clue, I diligently checked the answers next week and tried to figure out how it was worked out. They ran this series for a few weeks, before I got confident enough to try the main crossword meant for the grown ups!
So, in an effort to document what I know about solving crosswords, I am going to publish a post or a series of posts on "How to solve a cryptic crossword". I don't claim that I am an expert in anyway. This is just stuff I have picked up when I solve crosswords. I hope this is useful and makes a convert out of you, too! I have tried to use examples that I thought of or have come across in real crosswords to illustrate various clue types.
Now let's cross swords with crosswords!
Introduction
Crosswords are of two types - cryptic and non-cryptic. The non-cryptic ones would not warrant a series of posts on how to solve them. They usually have short straight clues which will lead to one or more answers. You use the number of letters in the clue, or the other letters you have already found on the grid based on solving other clues, to narrow down your answer.
For example, a simple clue might be:
Film's Spielberg (6)
The answer, quite simply is Steven, for Steven Spielberg.
There might be subtle word play in these, and some clues can be multi-word clues, without an idea of where the word's break. Let's see an example
Revenge (9)
This could be very tricky. One answer you can think of could be "Vengeance". It is a perfectly good answer. But imagine that you already have some letters in your grid for this answer. Let's assume, that the gaps in the grid are something like below:
T _ T F O _ T _T
Based on this, I could think of "Tit For Tat" as an answer. Notice that sometimes the clues don't give any idea that is multi-word. Some times, they might. I am sure, it would have been much easier, if the clue read:
Revenge(3,3,3)
The non-cryptic crosswords are typically bigger with a lot more open spaces, and the clue can lead to a few answers but then only one will fit in given the other words that will be intersecting it. The crossword setters make it interesting by identifying a theme and having clues that fall into this theme be the central answers - which typically span the entire width or height of the crossword grid.
While challenging in its own regard, to me, the non-cryptic ones are not as much fun as the cryptic ones, as they lack the analytical puzzle-solving aspect of it. That is all I have to say about non-cryptic crosswords.
I prefer and thrive on cryptic crosswords which will be the focus of the remainder of this post and many more to come.
The cryptic ones are the ones which lead you to a unique answer based on some puzzle, and meaning that appears in a clue. Each cryptic crossword clue has two main parts. The first part is the meaning of the answer, the second part is a puzzle by which we can get to the answer. There is no telling in what order these will occur in a clue. In some type of clues, there is also an indicator, that tells you what kind of puzzle it is. The challenge is to recognize where these parts are in a clue, then solve the puzzle to get the answer. Also, there is no specific order in which you have to go about solving it. You can solve the puzzle to get an answer and validate that with the meaning part of the clue, or in some cases, you can guess the meaning and try to validate that by solving the puzzle.
There are several types of puzzles that are employed by most crossword setters. The most common ones are:
- Anagrams
- Homophones
- Homographs
- Word play
- Containment
- Construction
- Literal
In the coming posts, I will try and tackle each type one at a time.
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