Monthly Archives: November 2011

There are a few terms routinely used to describe a so-called “rake”, often taken from literature. Sometimes such a womaniser might be called, somewhat unfairly I think, a “Romeo”. In today’s puzzle we encounter two more ways to describe such …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

We’ve talked about deletion clues in an earlier post. We get to the answer in such clues usually by subtracting some letters from a word given in the clue itself. We have a special example today, in which we are …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

It’s often necessary to make a reference in a clue to a single letter “O”, and over the decades cryptic crossword setters have come up with an exhaustive list of possibilities. Included are zero, round, around, ring, circle, love and …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

Shakespeare is much-loved in the world’s theatres, and indeed in the world’s crosswords. He makes a couple of appearances in today’s puzzle, including this reference to “the Scottish play”: 34 It’s gas for me, next to many a character in …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight on Sunday.

For Friday we’re introducing the last of the three new Crosaire grids. This grid is relatively open, with all the answers well connected to each other. There’s also a nice mix of lengths in the answers, from 4-letters to 10-letters. …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

Derek Crozier taught English, among other subjects, for many years at a school in Harare, Zimbabwe. It certainly showed in many of his clues, which had many references to famous authors and playwrights and their works. The use of literary …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

Today we are introducing the second of our three new grids. This new grid may look familiar, as it is indeed Derek Crozier’s old Wednesday design, but with a few black squares removed. This opens up the grid a little …

Apologies for the problems with the online versions of the puzzle this past couple of days. The technical team tells me that they’ve found the problem and it looks like there is a permanent fix in place. How did you …

We are introducing three new grids this week, to go along with the three grid designs that we’ve retained from the last few decades of Crosaire. Today’s new gird is a pretty standard, contemporary design, and I think the main …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

Cars are a great source of material for a crossword, I think. AUDI is a group of letters that turns up in so many words, especially those associated with hearing (audio-). The Volkswagen name is shortened to the very useful …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

There are oh so many types of clues e.g. container clues, subtraction clues, hidden-word clues and anagram clues. But some clues can’t really be categorised. They’re just little word games designed to slow us down for a few moments as …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight on Sunday night.

Derek Crozier was very fond of using the little rhyme that goes “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief! He would often point us to the “one in front of the sailor”, or “the one after …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight on tonight.

Ideally, a clue should be very precise with every word being there for a reason. And the clue should be very clear in instructing you in what to do in order to solve it. A clue should not “hint at” …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight on tonight.

In almost every cryptic crossword there’s a need for a word in a clue to be “reversed” and then used as part of the answer. There’s always a reversal signal in the clue telling as that we need to write …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight on tonight.

Deletion clues weren’t something that Derek was very fond of using, so the few that have showed up in Crosaire over the past week or so have caused a little trouble in some quarters. Usually we use addition to put …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight on tonight.

We deal with letters and words all the time when solving cryptic crosswords. And we need to take note that each letter is in fact a word i.e. each letter has a name that is spelled out as a word. …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight on tonight.

Sometimes a reference in a clue might be quite subtle. Sometimes the reference might even look like an error, a spelling mistake perhaps. Here’s an example from Saturday’s crossword: 1A: Annual message for one of the dwarfs by a third, …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight on Sunday night.

We aren’t really used to Hidden Word clues in Crosaire Land, but they do turn up quite often in Mary O’Brien’s wonderful Simplex Crossword. Personally I think they are fun, so I’ve included a few in the Crosaire puzzle over …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

Cryptic crossword clues are chock-full of references to abbreviations. 99 times out of 100, there is no indication that we are dealing with an abbreviation. However, sometimes such an indication can actually help the surface read more smoothly, so the …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

There have been a lot of comments on the blog about the addition of some “new” types of clues since we transitioned to “Crosaire by Mac an Iarla”. It is indeed true that I tend to use some devices that …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

As cryptic crossword addicts, I bet many of us wished that we had listened more carefully during chemistry class at school. The Periodic Table of the Elements gives us a lot of abbreviations for the names of elements that find …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

I’m not very musical, and don’t play an instrument. I do love to listen to music though, anything from the Middle Ages right up to the 1980s. I got left behind at the start of the 1990s, I’m afraid. Even …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

This Saturday puzzle sticks to the convention of having a themed constituent included in the four 13-letter answers around the outside of the grid. Today we have the theme word “BACK”. There’s a little bit of a twist though, in …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

The use of references to popular culture in a crossword is a topic of much debate. There are some who feel that it’s sacrilege to intermingle Beethoven and Shakespeare with Bono and Roddy Doyle. Personally I feel that the odd …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

One of the most powerful tools available to a crossword setter is the freedom to deceive by “fiddling” with punctuation. This means that when a solver is looking at a clue, he or she should be ready to add, subtract …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

A few years ago I read a fascinating book call “E=MC2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation”, by David Bodanis. This little gem explained, in layman’s terms, Albert Einstein’s 1905 equation that mathematically linked mass and energy. The …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.

I think that precision is important in a crossword clue. Every word that is used in the clue needs to play a role in the answer. If a word in the clue isn’t needed to explain the answer, then it …

How did you get on with today’s puzzle? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. The explanations for today’s clues will appear on the blog at midnight tonight.