Cryptic Clues: How They Work
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- Опубликовано: 4 фев 2020
- This is the definitive guide to cryptic clues!
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Hi! We're Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe, two of the UK's most enthusiastic puzzle solvers. We have both represented the UK at the World Sudoku Championships and the World Puzzle Championships. We're also "cryptic crossword" aficionados. Mark is the twelve-time winner of The Times championship and Simon is the former record holder for most consecutive correct solutions to The Listener crossword. We hope we can help your puzzle solving while also introducing you to some of the world's best puzzles.
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Some of my favourite exceptions are: Sgeg (7, 4); Play with angkooler (4, 4, 2, 5); and: Not this (8).
Answers:
SCRAMBLED EGGS
LOOK BACK IN ANGER
CLUELESS
Kell Willsen I only managed to get Sgeg because my friend mistyped eggs into a group chats and another friend said that's scrambled eggs.
@@Thaplayer1209 There was a whole episode of "Drop the Dead Donkey" where a major plot point was a character unable to decipher the crossword clue "GEGS". After 28 minutes of randomly saying "GEGS" in the middle of other people's conversations, a minor character tell him the answer. He gets FURIOUS, as it's the first crossword in years he hasn't figured out in decades.
Brilliant! SGEG and to an extent Angkooler remind me of "flats", a type of puzzles popularised by the National Puzzler's League in America. They deal strictly in wordplay and linguistic puns in case you want to see more similar clues.
My favourite ever has to be exanimation examination (10)
Postmortem
“Cryptic crosswords are harsh on people with a narrow vocabulary”
Me: That’s me
“Im referring to children”
Me: Right. I’m now going to drown my depression with brownies
Yeah. They're also harsh on ESL speakers and even native speakers outside the UK who are not used to their expressions.
@@rupen42 phew! I'm not a UK native. I'm not personally attacked. :)
Haha I hope they are green brownies ;)
@@rupen42 What's ESL? Do you mean British Sign Language?
@@dm9910 English as a Second Language. Non-native English speakers.
Hm. My English vocabulary appears comparable to that of a British child. The only clue I solved was, rather appropriately, the one about musical chairs.
I was happy when I got that instantly upon reading it... but now that you point this out... I feel a bit sad.
Not sure I should be cackling like a maniac when watching this, but I find this sort of crossword clue hilarious. Really good masterclass in clue solving. Thank you.
Very useful, thanks Mark, pleased to see cryptics getting some love on the channel. Speaking of which, "Rumpy Pumpy" there's a term I haven't heard for a long time :)
Only ever heard that expression on "Lewis" the police show.
This is one of my favorite videos because I had absolutely no idea how the cryptic clues were being solved. I went back and watched one and wasn't as fast but I could at least figure out how you were getting your answers. Thanks for the tips.
Thanks for this handy reference vid. Another piece of advice that I'd add is not to be shy about using a dictionary and a thesaurus. Crosswords aren't just for people who already have a broad vocabulary, they are also a great way to expand one. Likewise, it helps to have a broad knowledge base (everything from politics and pop culture to chemistry and classics) but anything you don't already know, you can look up.
Well, not under championship conditions, maybe. But for everyday solving, reference books are brilliant.
How does one know when one should look up something? For instance, if you have no idea about this ling fish, how would you get there just knowing it's a tropical fish? Would you have to look at a comprehensive list of tropical fish to see if there was something that could fit the clue?
@@RandomBurfness In this case, I think it's more likely that you'd guess the solution once you've got INK, and then you'd use a dictionary to look up LING to check that it's a fish. I do that a lot. Also, often there's an obscure word in a clue that I have to look up to get a start on the solution
@@bentillett3759 But what if you can't do that? What if you are literally unaware of the word in question? What if you literally cannot guess at the word, but you know the parts of the wordplay? What is the GENERAL idea which works IN EVERY SINGLE CASE? Because this doesn't hold water in every case. Can these things ONLY be resolved by going through a comprehensive list of things?
RandomBurfness this was the issue I had too. I could follow along the logic of every example in this video as it was being explained, but I’m completely lost on how to pull these answers answers out on my own.
@@RandomBurfness I have to do that all of the time solving crosswords in my native Swedish. But I have a much large vocabulary to start with, so i am more likely to figure out things like ink and inkling (which i did here) without knowing about the ling (which I would look up). One I knew it was an addition clue, it was the one clue I had any inkling about.
I've thought about making something like this for my friends interested in getting into cryptics. I'll be sending them all here instead. Thanks for working this up! This is a very good primer.
Arguably they're a subset of Hidden, but initialisms and alternate letter clues are so common these days that they're almost categories of their own. Also, the 'substitute X for Y' ones seem to crop up more than once a week.
12:55 you just worded why I couldn't understand any of those clues- I'm a non native English speaker and my vocabulary only contains commonly used words
Fantastic video. Loving your channel overall.
Excellent video. Thanks for this.
Lovely! Thank you.
Thank you so much! You have been so helpful!
Brilliant... many thanks for that.
I'd say most of these examples rely on British English that's too obscure for viewers in other countries to possibly know.
Which includes Ireland, Scotland an Wales, probably.
@@57thorns Even if their sizes might be relatively similar, whales swim in the ocean. Wales is a region of land in the western part of the UK (between London and Ireland). :(
@@NelielSugiura I never get that spelling right, sincere apologies to any Welsh persons who had to endure that.
Interesting tips, thanks. Caught the Picard reference too
Thank you from an American who has been trying - even occasionally succeeding - to do British xwords since I worked on a NATO program with some Brits, many years ago.
Thank You!
Always nice to see a crossword video from you, thanks. I hope you enjoyed the 90th birthday jumbo on Saturday?
As a non native speaker this video is necessary to even try to appreciate your crossword's video. Thank you a lot
American here. Thanks, Mark!
After seeing this it is clear that the audience for you sudoku (and other puzzle types) videos is just as exclusive as the crossword parts, but there are after all just a few hundre million native Enghlish speakers in the worlds, while puzzles and numbers are truly a universal language.
I find your comment about "narrow vocabulary" quite condescending against your international audience. I have no problem understanding the logic, it is just that I do not have the same vocabulary in English as I have in say Swedish. Please feel free to solve a Swedish competition crossword.
He said "narrow vocabulary" he didn't say you're stupid that was own inference because of your own weak stupid mind
About homophones, how do I know when an idea I have is a legitimate homophone? My non-native accent might mess this up. Is there any official reference material for this, so it works regardless of your accent?
Good question. The Times Crossword relies on a 'Received Pronunciation' British accent to determine legitimacy of homophones, but a better way is to require that a dictionary pronunciation guide shows identical phonemes to ensure accuracy for all (the Listener and the Magpie require this in Chambers Dictionary). My favourite almost-homophone (works in my accent, but not in rhotic ones) is SISTERLY - SYSTOLE.
can you give a cryptic code for the word routine
"People think crossword clues are a whole language they could never understand"
"I think crosswords are a bit hard on people with a narrow vocabulary"
Those comments are a lot more on the nose than you acknowledge in the video. You emphasise how many clues can only be found through repeated exposure to crosswords. You also dismiss your second point about how some of the words are way outside the common vocabulary by implying that's mostly about children - but what about the entire population without a higher education and/or lengthy reads? What about non-native speakers?
I understand you're passionate about crosswords and try to encourage people who feel it's too hard for them to still give it a go. But please, do admit that they are a highly exclusive hobby that requires both a high level of general knowledge AND lengthy training. It's not even enough to know the words, you have to know the codes, the ways the words are used in such situations - it very much is its own dialect. It's definitely not something everyone can do well, and it's no coincidence most crossword aficionados are well-read, middle-to-upper class people.
I'm not a native speaker and I gotta tell you, homophones are my worst nightmare. I never know when one is correct. It's one of my biggest hurdles getting into this stuff.
Thank you. I wanted to make a similar comment.
I, as a non-native speaker of English, have a lot of trouble solving English crossword puzzles, although I don't have problems solving them in my native language.
I have a rather high level of knowledge about the English language and I do read scientific as well as literary texts without any problems. But, for example, I have never heard the word brisket before. Now, because of this video, I know what it means, because I came across it by accident, but words like that or for example cupidity never crossed my path until now. It is not nice to assume, people who didn't come across specific words were stupid or lacking in ability. They just might not have been exposed to this particular word yet.
@@Speireata4 Brisket is one I heard before, but I once considered the difference between reading computer science books in English and going to a grocery store. I realised I am at a loss when it comes to what anything but the most common vegetables are called.
You also have to remember people usually associate with others similar to them. It is quite likely he surrounds himself with people of high intellect with wide vocabularies and doesn't realise how rare these skills are in the general population. I did laugh when I agreed with him it was hard for me with my narrow vocabulary and then he said "like children".
@@harrytanner2340 Yes!! Thank you, exactly my experience.
When I watch something like this, I get a little boosted with thoughts of "Oh, I write a lot, and love to help fix English grammar, etcetera, so I should be able to manage these." but am still daunted by it when I see your long videos and know you are an expert (just like I do not do the longer sudoku's on your channel). However, I assume there are ranking levels to cryptic crosswords as there are to sudoku puzzles. Are there some one-star ones out there rather than jumping to our local paper and likely getting in over our head? Just like with any other form of puzzle, we would be hooked and appreciative of it more if we started out with something simpler and worked into harder things.
GAMES World of Puzzles magazine has two regular and two variety cryptic crosswords every issue. They are definitely easier than the British newspaper versions, especially for North Americans! Also, you can get The Times Quick Cryptic Crosswords books which are a bit more of a challenge but much easier for beginner to intermediate solvers (available on Amazon, etc.)
Looking at Google Ngrams, you can see words like "cupidity" and "llanos" are pretty rarely used these days so it would be reasonable to assume even educated, native English-speaking adults would struggle too, not just children. You have to be particularly well-read to have a chance at these sorts of clues, not just "an adult".
On the other hand, someone who's not used to cryptic crosswords (like me) might find the "musical chairs" clue particularly easy as our minds don't jump straight to alternative or more obscure meanings.
10:35 "always an indicator for an anagram".
There *should* always be one.
From a paper cryptic crossword last week:
"Coat in deed (6)"
Answer: ACTION
which means "deed" but is also an anagram of "COAT IN".
It is only possibly by the seemingly totally unconnectedness of "coat" and "deed" that an anagram is suggested, especially as the "in" word is part of the anagram.
Probably the writer @cigmorfil will not see this late answer, but anyway, a thought crossed me that "deed" might be the indicator, thus double-acting as clue and part of the wordplay. Do the "deed" of anagramming on the letters in "coat in" to arrive at the synonym to "deed"!
first Double Definition i ever figured out
is still my favorite = Summer Snake (5)
I hate that my mind instantly took the sexual variation of "snake" that is five letters >.>
Computative reptile!
Adder
cool clue
My favourite is:
Moon starer (10)
Hint
Anag & Lit
Answer:
Astronomer
I hope I can know practice more, since english is not my first language, knowing all the clue types ! Thanks for the explanations !
In the removal clue, why thrown by GREED. He doesn’t explain why greed is there and a rule of cryptic crosswords is that random words cannot be included in the clue.
As English is not my mother tongue, I will probably never have enough vocabulary to crack any single phrase of the cryptic crosswords that you do. But it was nevertheless very interesting to see how this type of puzzle works and how you solve them as easily as sudoku.
Cryptic Crosswords are very hard for non-natives. And it looks like, that other cultures doesn't have such things. For example, in Russia crosswords are very popular, but we don't have cryptic variant of them.
What "Times" paper is this from? The New York Times Crossword is nothing like this lol
The Times is a British newspaper based in London
@@AnRuixuan Ah, that's good to know!
The New York Times actually has six or so of these kinds of crosswords every year, but yeah certainly less common in the US.