If that’s your aim, don’t read on, because the subject of this article, Cryptic Crosswords, are intended to baffle and frustrate and twist your brain and contort and torture your thinking until you are more than likely to start swearing...

The key word here is “cryptic” - hidden, concealed, secret. They look like an ordinary crossword on the surface, but the nature of the clues is to make discovery of an answer more difficult - yet, curiously, more positive than in the case of the simple clue. You may be able to find your way into solving cryptic clues just by trial and error, but I know a lot of intelligent people with good vocabularies who still find them entirely baffling. My intention here is to provide an entry point for them: to show how at least the commoner kinds of clue work.

I could use lots of lovely computer graphics in this site, animations, scans of real crosswords etc., but they would be slow to download and not really show you anything that you don’t already know about the nature of the beast. If you’ve never done any kind of crossword before at all, this is not the place for you. This article is intended to help people make the breakthrough from the simple clue ones to the cryptic clue ones. I’m assuming, therefore, that you already know what a blank crossword looks like, what the number mean and how they relate to the list of clues. It will suffice, therefore, for me to use only underscores as blanks (as in playing Hangman) and dispense with a more graphical representation.

To start with, let us take a non-cryptic clue and examine it.

This consists of a definition, plain and simple. A three letter word with the meaning “feline quadruped”. The answer is likely to be C A T. I said “likely to be”, because I suppose there are other, less likely, possibilities, such as M O G or K I T. Those are pretty dubious alternatives and there isn’t much doubt here. Sometimes the definition is vaguer though and it needs a few letters from other answers to be filled in before the exact identity of the word can be identified by elimination. Consider:

Here it could be C A T or D O G that is the answer, or even a (Vietnamese pot-bellied) P I G. You’d need a C or an A or D or an O to be sure.

Now let us see what a Cryptic clue for the same word might look like.

Here we have, paradoxically, more information about the exact identity of the word. This clue contains, as all clues must, a definition - here “Viewer of royalty” - but it is not a straightforward definition. “A cat may look at a king” - but until you have the word “cat” in mind, those words may well not fall into place as a definition of the word. The second part of the clue is another kind of definition of a sort - a lexical or spelling clue to identity of the word. A “catastrophe” is a “disaster”, and starts with the letters C A T. That’s quite devious and obscure and depends upon your realising that a synonym (word that means the same as another word) is required and then finding the right synonym for “disaster”. On its own “starts disaster” tells you very little indeed, but if you have already made a tentative guess as to the identity of the royal viewer, it does act as confirmation that you have found the right word. And although both halves of this clue are quite difficult in themselves, once the clue is solved, there is enough confirmation built in for you to be satisfied that you definitely have the right answer, which is why I said “yet often more positive than in the case of the simple clue” above.

You, of course, came to that clue already knowing the solution. Had you not known the answer, your first step would have been to try and analyse that clue, and work out which part of it was the definition and which part was some other kind of evidence. The probabilities would be that the definition was concerned with either “viewer” or “disaster”. “Of royalty” is modifying “viewer” (which makes it unlikely) and the “starts” doesn’t look too likely (though it can’t be eliminated). We can take nothing absolutely for granted, however, because we are up against another mind that is setting out to mislead and confuse us. We are engaged in a battle of wits with “Kryptikon”, or whatever pseudonym the setter is concealing his identity behind. The harder the battle, the more satisfying the buzz we get when it all falls into place and we see the unique solution.

Although definition plus spelling hint is a common type of cryptic clue, it’s not the only kind possible. Before we start looking at the forms those spelling hints can take, let us consider the “double definition” clue.

What do you make of that? From what I have already said, you will guess that here are two definitions of the same word - or rather of the letters that make up the answer, because we could be concerned with homonyms (words that mean something different but have the same spelling). The key words appear to be (though never take anything at face value) “follow” and “support”. One’s a verb and the other is a noun, so it does look as if we are looking for homonyms here - two words with the same spelling, one of which means something like “follow” and the other means this mysterious “support”. You will probably have worked out by now that we are no longer concerned with C A T. “To cat” does not mean to follow faithfully. A cat may be found on a hot tin roof, but it is unlikely to be used to support flames.

Light will no doubt dawn eventually, particularly if you get a letter from another intersecting word to help. To dog someone’s footsteps can mean to follow them faithfully and fire dogs are metal supports used in old fashioned hearths to hold the fire in place. Once the word is solved, the definitions become clear and we will have little doubt that we have the correct answer. We can fill in D O G with a pretty high degree of confidence that we have the solution.

On the next page, we will look at some of the common types of spelling based hints and clues...

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