The Times How to Crack Cryptic Crosswords. Tim Moorey
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3. The homophone clue
In this type, the solution sounds like another word given by the wordplay. The clue is often fairly easy to recognize but it may be harder to find the two words which sound alike.
HOMOPHONE CLUE: Reportedly makes pots (4)
Indicators for homophone clues:
Anything which gives an impression of sounding like another word such as so to speak, we hear, it’s said acts as an indicator. This extends to what’s heard in different real-life situations; for example, at home it could be on the radio; in the theatre it could be to an audience; in the office it could be for an auditor.
4. The hidden clue
A hidden clue is arguably the easiest type to solve. That’s because the letters to be uncovered require no change: they just need to be dug out of the sentence designed to conceal them. In the first example, the indicator is in:
HIDDEN CLUE: Parched in the Kalahari desert (4)
Indicators for hidden clues:
Commonly some (in the sense of a certain part of what follows), some of, partly, are unique to hidden clues; within, amidst, holding and in can be either hidden or sandwich indicators.
A variant of the hidden clue is where the letters are concealed at intervals within the wordplay, most commonly odd or even letters. You are asked to extract letters that appear as, say, the first, third and fifth letters in the wordplay section of the clue sentence and ignore the intervening letters. Note that there would not normally be superfluous words in such a clue sentence, making it easier to be certain which letters are involved in the extraction.
Here is one such clue in which you have to take only the odd letters of culture for the solution.
HIDDEN CLUE: Odd bits of culture such as this (4)
Some indicators for hidden-at-intervals clues:
Oddly, evenly, regularly, ignoring the odds, alternately.
5. The takeaway clue
A takeaway clue involves something being deducted from something else. This can be one or more letters or a whole word. In the example below it’s one letter, R, which is an abbreviation of right, and get is an instruction to the solver. It should be noted that sometimes you will find abbreviations signposted, e.g. ‘a small street’, more usually not, e.g. ‘street’. You will find in the Appendices a list of those most frequently appearing in crosswords and all of those used in the clues and puzzles of this book.
TAKEAWAY CLUE: Get employed right away in Surrey town (6)
In our second example, it’s the first letter that is to be taken away to leave the solution:
TAKEAWAY CLUE: Possess a topless dress (3)
Indicators for takeaway clues:
These tend to be self-explanatory, such as reduced, less, extracted, but, beware, they can be highly misleading, such as cast in a clue concerning the theatre, or shed in one ostensibly about the garden. Some indicators inform us that a single letter is to be taken away. These include short, almost, briefly, nearly and most of, all signifying by long-established convention that the final letter of a word is to be removed. There is more on takeaway indicators such as unopened, disheartened, needing no introduction and endless on pages 31–33, which deal with letter selection indicators.
6. The reversal clue
The whole of a solution can sometimes be reversed to form another entirely different word. In addition, writing letters backwards or upwards is often part of a clue’s wordplay, but for the time being we are concerned with reversal providing the whole of the answer. This is a clue for an across solution:
REVERSAL CLUE: Knock back beer like a king (5)
This is a reversal clue for a down solution (see below for an explanation of why this matters):
REVERSAL CLUE: Put out by mounting objections (4)
Indicators for reversal clues:
Anything showing backward movement, e.g. around, over, back, recalled.
Do be aware that some reversal indicators apply to down clues only, reflecting their position in the grid. The example above of a down clue uses mounting for this purpose; other possibilities are overturned, raised, up, on the way up and served up.
7. The letter switch clue
Where two words differ from each other by one or more letters, this can be exploited by setters so that moving one or more letters produces another word, the solution. Here is an example in which you are instructed to shift the W for West in when in a way that produces a word meaning axed. You are not told in which direction the move should be, but here it can only be to the right.
An extra point to be brought out here is that if a pause or comma after the first two words is imagined, the instruction should become clearer. This imaginary punctuation effect is common to many crossword clues; see Chapter 4, pages 40–42, for more on this point.
LETTER SWITCH CLUE: Axed when West’s moved (4)
There is also a form of letter switch in which letters are replaced; see Chapter 8, page 70, for more on this.
8. The all-in-one clue
In many crossword circles this is also known as & lit, christened by Ximenes. However, I have found my workshop participants usually consider this too cryptic a name! It actually means ‘and is literally so’ but people tend to puzzle over that at the expense of understanding the concept.
In fact, it is a simple one that I prefer to call all-in-one, which is what it is: the definition and wordplay are combined into one, often shortish sentence which, when decoded, leads to a description