![]() ![]() Unless you are taking the whole thing very seriously indeed and travelling the world to compete in crossword competitions (and, yes, some people do!) it ’s usually just the cost of a magazine, newspaper or puzzle book, and the pen or pencil needed to write in the answers!įilling in a crossword helps to pass the time on boring train journeys, and gives you something relaxing to do while you drink your morning coffee, laze in a hot bath or have your hair done. It’s a fascinating hobby that costs very little to pursue. In fact, solving a daily puzzle has been shown to help reduce the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s, or at least to delay its onset.įrom the simplest clues you might find in a magazine’s ‘coffee break’ puzzle page to the real stinkers in the more high-brow daily newspapers (the sort of clues that can take hours to understand, let alone solve!) there is a definite sense of achievement when you see those little white boxes in the grid slowly filling up as you get nearer and nearer to completing your puzzle. They help you to keep your brain function in good working order and slow down the memory loss that inevitably creeps up on us as we get older. There is something very satisfying about completing a crossword puzzle. Finally, if you’d like an explanation of a particularly puzzling answer, consult the answer key at the bottom of this post.Are you baffled by cryptic crosswords? Do you want to increase your word power and exercise your brain, but can’t make any sense of the clues? There is no secret formula to cracking the cryptic crossword. ![]() And at the top of this post is a video in which two of our crossword constructors-Erik Agard and Anna Shechtman-offer some cryptic-solving tips. ![]() Starting in December, we’ll publish one every Sunday on .įor those who are new to cryptics, there is a guide to some of the common varieties of cryptic clues below. For Thanksgiving, we present this cornucopia of our favorite New Yorker cryptics. That non-newsy quality also makes cryptics an ideal holiday pastime: you can solve them with your aunt who’s on the other side of the political spectrum (or tune her out by getting lost in one). Cryptics, by comparison, age gracefully: their sphinxlike wordplay has a long shelf life. Margaret Farrar, the first crossword editor of the Times, told this magazine, in 1959, “I favor using lots of book titles, play titles, names in the news, and so on.” The protean stuff of culture keeps the fifteen-by-fifteen grid lively, but it also makes the average Farrar-era puzzle, to a solver in 2019, as alien as a mid-sixties Betty Crocker recipe. American-style crosswords, inseparably associated with daily newspapers, tend to yellow with age. Fraser Simpson was the editor and a frequent constructor-along with Patrick Berry, whose name will be familiar to fans of our American-style crossword.įind our entire archive of cryptic crosswords here-and a brand-new puzzle every Sunday.īrowsing through those cryptics twenty years later, we were delighted to find that they remain a smooth, albeit challenging, solve. Its unusual, condensed design-an eight-by-ten rectangular grid with bars in lieu of the typical black “blocks” separating words-was cooked up by the senior editor and staff writer Hendrik Hertzberg, who launched the puzzle. If that kind of thing strikes you as sadistic, be grateful that you’re not tangling with the London Observer’s weekly cryptic, where the celebrated setters (as cryptic constructors are known) have traditionally derived their pseudonyms from various Spanish Grand Inquisitors.įrom 1997 to 1999, The New Yorker ran a cryptic crossword in the back of the magazine. ![]() The magic happens, of course, where the two meet: “DISC,” considered as “IS” inside “DC,” can be clued as “Record is set in Washington”-“record” being another word for “disc,” and the word “is” being literally “set” within Washington (that is, metonymically, D.C.). Basically, a cryptic clue consists of two elements: a definition of the answer (the so-called straight part), and a wordplay element that elliptically suggests the same answer (the cryptic portion). Unlike American-style crosswords, in which clues are usually synonyms or bits of trivia, a cryptic contains clues that are small puzzles in and of themselves. Like steak-and-kidney pie, the cryptic crossword is hugely popular in Britain and, to put it delicately, an acquired taste for most Americans. ![]()
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