How do I get better at cryptic crosswords?
March 3, 2011 1:49 PM   Subscribe

I want to get better at cryptic crosswords!

Of the British broad-sheet style (or Ximinean style, if you prefer)

I regularly do a cryptic crossword, but it's of the Birmingham Mail standard - kind of above tabloid difficulty, but still fairly light-weight when it comes to cryptics. I can generally complete around 85% of the clues in these crosswords, fairly quickly (in the time it takes to travel home basically). If occasionally complete them, maybe once a fortnight.

However, every time I even attempt a broadsheet cryptic, I get hopelessly, ridiculously lost and can barely do a single clue. I would -love- to be able to tackle Auracacia or Paul and win, but I'd settle for beating Rufus!!

So, what resources, paths, and aids should I use when tackling the masters? Please hope me mefi :-)
posted by BigCalm to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (12 answers total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Would the interim stage be something like the Daily Telegraph, or Oxford Times? My experience of cryptics was very much a slow levelling-up through the papers (though I certainly can't do Auracacia either, so you may wish to ignore me!).
posted by piato at 2:05 PM on March 3, 2011


This series of articles from the Guardian may be of some use.

Also, check out the Guardian's online cryptics. Using the buttons to check your answers, or (gasp) even cheat can help work out the general codes used in the clues.

This one
from Rufus was reasonably doable.
posted by Miss Otis' Egrets at 2:13 PM on March 3, 2011


How to do the Times Crossword by Brian Greer might be a starting point. Each broadsheet definitely has a style of its own and although the skills for one may not directly translate to another, there's common ground. Like everything else, practice! I found filling in the answers and working the clues back to be most helpful. There are a number of crossword blogs and forums where the more seemingly impenetrable clues are explained, or at least argued about.
posted by nicktf at 2:27 PM on March 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: I've tried the Telegraph and had more luck than other broadsheets generally, but I can't bring myself to support the Barclay brothers (I do buy it on Saturday for the general knowledge crossword occasionally) :-)

The guardian cryptics are what I'm aiming at, but that series of articles from the guardian fills me with fear - there's just SO MUCH MORE that I need to know even to be able to attempt it! However, those guardian articles look pretty handy, and might give me a small, tiny leg up towards the masters.
posted by BigCalm at 3:06 PM on March 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'd suggest trying to find someone who regularly does this kind of puzzle and to pick their brains and/or try to solve some puzzles together.

I learnt by watching one of my teachers at school do the Times crossword every day in her coffee break (she and another teacher used to race each other - he was a setter for the Listener - it was pretty high-powered stuff!) . Although she didn't explicitly 'teach' me, she'd often think out loud whilst she was doing the clues. I got used to the basic types of clues and common assumptions that you're expected to make.

As I got more experienced, I was able to chip in more and more (it turned out I was quicker at anagrams, for instance, but not as skilled at spotting the actual clue-type). Eventually I was able to make a decent go of the crossword every day.

At the end of the day, though, it'll come down to practice/experience.
posted by dogsbody at 3:08 PM on March 3, 2011


[i] I can't bring myself to support the Barclay brothers[/i]

I'm the same, but I just buy the compiled crossword books from amazon second-hand. I find I learn the most from reading the answers straight away, without a day's wait, and writing down some notes ("oh so a policeman cad be 'CID'? That's why they're always deciding and drinking cider!").

A crossword buddy sounds like a lovely idea.
posted by piato at 3:24 PM on March 3, 2011


The guardian cryptics are what I'm aiming at

I find some Guardian setters much easier than others. Rufus and Paul are two I can generally do about half of. They might be worth starting with. Araucaria on the other hand I don't even bother with...

Like others, what I found most helpful in learning to do cryptics in the first place was practice: looking at the answers for the previous day and trying to work out the rules.
posted by greycap at 3:52 PM on March 3, 2011


Best answer: Here is my style of handling cryptics. I cannot guarantee results but I can tell you that I have completed a couple while on an airplane without the ability to check my work. Which, by the way, is immensely gratifying.

First: Learn the language of the clues. There's some folks that try to give you a formal list of techniques used (GAMES magazine does this), but really they're guidelines. Generally speaking the clues look like nonsense because there is almost always a synonym for the correct answer somewhere in there, and then the cryptic part.

Second: Read all the clues first and don't get stuck on any. This is crucial, because they're not all the same difficulty. Expect that several of them you're going to look at and say "Christ's soupy beard, are you serious?" (You may not say this precisely but lord knows I have). Skip those. Shorter ones will be easier. The number of letters given is your friend.

Third: Be prepared to half-solve clues. Cryptics are generally (for me anyway) kind of an intuitive process. I will explain what I mean.

We'll start with this one. I just clicked on it five minutes ago.

Naturally the first one I looked at was one across, which is: "Describing an easy ball over middle of hole — on this? (4, 5)"

Hey, crossword writer: Fuck you. I have no idea what the hell that even is. I'll come back to it.

The next one I read was one down and here's where we get into the intuitive, half-solving part, because I figured it out almost immediately.

"Shame about English holiness (5)"

It's got five letters and the clue has four words. Remember the synonym part: It's going to be a synonym for one of those words: Shame, about, English, holiness.

Something you need to bear in mind is that the clues are best thought of as pantomime. Your brain tricks you into thinking that the meaning conveyed by the sentence means something. Of course, sometimes it does, or can give you what you need to crack the nut.

So we've got a five-letter word which is a synonym for one of those four words and which will be sort of supported by the wordplay.

We also need to consider that the "stage directions" tend to be kind of hidden, which is part of what makes them hard. So here's a trick: Keep an eye out for prepositions.

Like "about," for example.

Realistically we can now toss that; we are down to three candidates. Shame, English, piety. There are probably five-letter synonyms for English but I have no idea what they are, and if that were the answer it would violate the almost universal rule that cryptics are never as difficult as they seem. We are down to two.

Shame, holiness.

The holiness part jumped at me so I thought, what are synonyms for that, with five letters. We have: piety.

Here I stopped because I knew that was it.

So: Shame (pity) about (around - again, preposition) English...hm. Here is what I mean about half-solving. I never would have figured that the word English represented a capital E in the answer but it does make a degree of sense. That's another thing: capitalized words often represent single letters. Often, not always.

Pity around E. Piety.

That is seriously the whole process and there isn't more to it than that. You increase your chances of being able to figure them out if you start with the easy ones, so if you start to get stuck on one, keep moving. You'll add letters and it will start looking like a word, and that makes it a lot easier.

Oh, and fourth: Resist the temptation to just stare at a clue until your brain comes up with the answer by itself. It ain't going to happen. I am speaking from a lot of experience on this.

As a final thought, what I have to offer here is that part of why they seem so hard is the tremendous array of seemingly possible answers. This is why I recommend the approach I take above: Eliminate as many options as you can. Think of the old logic puzzle someone probably tried on you as a kid where you have ten tries to guess a number between one and a thousand, and they will only tell you if your guess is too high or too low. Instinctively we think that our chances of getting it are ten in a thousand (so one in a hundred), but they're not: every time you guess you can eliminate half the possibilities and if you bear that in mind then you won't even need the full ten guesses.

Cryptic crosswords are like that. Start eliminating things which obviously don't fit (prepositions, the notion that the actual sentence should provide any insight, words with no commonly-used synonyms) and what you have left over will be much more manageable.

But that's just how I do it, and something different may work for you. Nevertheless I hope this helps.
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 6:02 PM on March 3, 2011 [9 favorites]


Oh, and keep an eye out for homonyms. For example, in the same puzzle:

"… Asian fuddled in speech, key worker (6)"

(The ellipsis is there because it is sort of connected to the previous clue)

Anyway the answer is typist.

The important part here is "In speech," which is our hint that it is something which may only make sense if said out loud. Same goes for "We hear" or the like.

This is also kind of a bawdy joke so I'm really sort of in love with the Guardian cryptics - I'd never done one of theirs before.
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 6:09 PM on March 3, 2011


I "discovered" cryptics decades ago, and it came from a lot of work. Two years apprenticeship on standard synonym crosswords to build up my vocabulary to a point where I had a thesaurus in my head. Then probably several months of studying the answers of a daily cryptic the following day until I had figured out the "code", and then I started actually completing a few. I suspect you may be at that point already - I know Brits usually have a better grasp of the mother tongue than us colonials.

But then came the spark, the gentle sting of a whip that determined I would enjoy every single cryptic I did in future - the "laugh out loud" moment, where the humour of the compiler was the reward for solving his little conundrum. FM has it - it's more than a puzzle, it's a game wherein you discover the punchline.

The most notorious cryptic clue I read about was : "E (13)" - so notorious it is mentioned in Wikipedia.

There are other types, such as anagrams, constructed and reversed words, inclusions etc but there are always synonyms.

As a side note, I bravely attempted the Time crossword once. I think I got one answer before I gave up. The Private Eye puzzle is a world of its own.

But always, it is something to have fun with.
posted by arzakh at 4:00 AM on March 4, 2011


Response by poster: Yes, I find doing (my admittedly low-difficulty) cryptics very satisfying - at their best, they're funny, clever, (have really terrible puns), and are informative and interesting. There a refreshing change from stuff that's dumbed-down to appeal to a wider audience. Doing a cryptic puzzle is a battle of wits between you and the compiler - and I'd dearly love to pit my wits against the best :-)
posted by BigCalm at 5:02 AM on March 4, 2011


Go through the answers, every day, and make sure you understand why each answer is correct and how it fully relates to the clue. In this way you start to learn certain standard "tricks" many cryptic crossword compilers use. A few examples of things like this - that you just have to know - off the top of my head..

- sometimes you'll see something like "...takes student inside..." in the clue and all it means is that the letter 'L' features in the interior of the answer (because 'L' signifies 'Learner'). there are other such examples that might well be opaque to someone not in the know - some compilers will do rather forced things such as using "work" in a clue to signify "op" (operation) in the answer. Yeah, I know. And you just have to know.

- or you might see something like 'communist' in the clue become 'red', or "L" (for 'left"), in the answer.

- always watch out for anagrams. These are usually clued-in by the wording, such as "Keeps dissolving in tears". The answer is "RETAINS". "Keeps" indicates the full meaning of the answer, and "in tears" is "dissolved" to produce it. That is, "dissolving" is your clue that what follows is an anagram.

- You will sometimes see clues which are just short, pithy statements followed by a question mark or exclamation mark. These usually indicate that the answer is a groansome pun or wordplay. One of my favourite examples is: "Cor!", the answer to which is "French Horn". Another is "You Eve?", which yields "Second Person". Delightfully clever and painful, and with this type of clue you just have to exercise your lateral thinking skills.

- You'll sometime see the "run-on" clue in which the answer is actually staring you in the face, contained in the letters of the clue but spread over two or more of the words. An example would be: "More lice are found to contain what remains" - RELIC. The word is actually spelled out in "MORE LICE", i.e. those two words are "'found to contain " "what remains", which is the definition part of the clue.

I could go on, but there are a number of sites out there that go through all of the common forms of cryptic clue for you. But the real answer is, as I said, to do the crosswords and analyse the answers until you get how they are arrived at.

I love cryptic crosswords.
posted by Decani at 3:58 AM on March 6, 2011


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