A cryptic crossword is a crossword puzzle in which each clue is a word puzzle. Cryptic crosswords are particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where they originated, as well as Ireland, the Netherlands, and in several Commonwealth nations, including Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malta, New Zealand, and South Africa. Compilers of cryptic crosswords are commonly called setters in the UK and constructors in the US. Particularly in the UK, a distinction may be made between cryptics and quick (i.e. standard) crosswords, and sometimes two sets of clues are given for a single puzzle grid.
Cryptic crossword puzzles come in two main types: the basic cryptic in which each clue answer is entered into the diagram normally, and themed or variety cryptics, in which some or all of the answers must be altered before entering, usually in accordance with a hidden pattern or rule which must be discovered by the solver.
History and development Cryptic crosswords originated in the UK. The first British crossword puzzles appeared around 1923 and were purely definitional, but from the mid-1920s they began to include cryptic material: not cryptic clues in the modern sense, but anagrams, classical allusions, incomplete quotations, and other references and wordplay. Torquemada (Edward Powys Mathers), who set for The Saturday Westminster from 1925 and for The Observer from 1926 until his death in 1939, was the first setter to use cryptic clues exclusively and is often credited as the inventor of the cryptic crossword.
The first newspaper crossword appeared in the Sunday Express on 2 November 1924. Crosswords were gradually taken up by other newspapers, appearing in the Daily Telegraph from 1925, The Manchester Guardian from 1929 and The Times from 1930. These newspaper puzzles were almost entirely non-cryptic at first and gradually used more cryptic clues, until the fully cryptic puzzle as known today became widespread. In some papers this took until about 1960. Puzzles appeared in The Listener from 1930, but this was a weekly magazine rather than a newspaper, and the puzzles were much harder than the newspaper ones, though again they took a while to become entirely cryptic. Composer Stephen Sondheim, a lover of puzzles, is credited with introducing cryptic crosswords to American audiences, through a series of puzzles he created for New York in 1968 and 1969.
Torquemada's puzzles were extremely obscure and difficult, and later setters reacted against this tendency by developing a standard for fair clues, ones that can be solved, at least in principle, by deduction, without needing leaps of faith or insights into the setter's thought processes.
The basic principle of fairness was set out by Listener setter Afrit (Alistair Ferguson Ritchie) in his book Armchair Crosswords (1946), wherein he credits it to the fictional Book of the Crossword:
An example of a clue which cannot logically be taken the right way:
Here the composer intends the answer to be , with "hat" the definition, "could be" the anagram indicator, and the anagram fodder. I.e., "derby" is an anagram of "be dry". But "be" is doing double duty, and this means that any attempt to read the clue cryptically in the form "[definition] [anagram indicator] [fodder]" fails: if "be" is part of the anagram indicator, then the fodder is too short, but if it is part of the fodder, there is no anagram indicator; to be a correct clue it would have to be "Hat could be be dry (5)", which is ungrammatical. A variation might read Hat turns out to be dry (5), but this also fails because the word "to", which is necessary to make the sentence grammatical, follows the indicator ("turns out") even though it is not part of the anagram indicated.
Torquemada's successor at The Observer was Ximenes (Derrick Somerset Macnutt), and in his influential work, Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword Puzzle (1966), he set out more detailed guidelines for setting fair cryptic clues, now known as "Ximenean principles" and sometimes described by the phrase "square-dealing".Reissued Aug 2001: Swallowtail Books , The most important of them are tersely summed up by Ximenes' successor Azed (Jonathan Crowther):
The Ximenean principles are adhered to most strictly in the subgenre of advanced cryptics—difficult puzzles using barred grids and a large vocabulary. Easier puzzles often have more relaxed standards, permitting a wider array of clue types, and allowing a little flexibility. The popular Guardian setter Araucaria (John Galbraith Graham) was a noted non-Ximenean, celebrated for his witty, if occasionally unorthodox, clues.
Popularity Most of the major national newspapers in the UK carry both cryptic and concise (quick) crosswords in every issue. The puzzle in The Guardian is well loved for its humour and quirkiness, and quite often includes puzzles with themes, which are extremely rare in The Times.How to master the Times Crossword, Tim Moorey, p. 186
Many Canadian newspapers, including the Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, carry cryptic crosswords.
Cryptic crosswords do not commonly appear in U.S. publications, although they can be found in magazines such as Games, The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper's, and occasionally in the Sunday New York Times. The New York Post reprints cryptic crosswords from The Times. In April 2018, The New Yorker published the first of a new weekly series of cryptic puzzles. Other sources of cryptic crosswords in the U.S. (at various difficulty levels) are puzzle books, as well as UK and Canadian newspapers distributed in the U.S. Other venues include the Enigma, the magazine of the National Puzzlers' League, and formerly, The Atlantic Monthly. The latter puzzle, after a long and distinguished run, appeared solely on The Atlantics website for several years, and ended with the October 2009 issue. A similar puzzle by the same authors appeared every four weeks in The Wall Street Journal, from January 2010 to December 2023 . Cryptic crosswords have become more popular in the United States in the years following the COVID-19 lockdowns with several "indie" outlets and setters.
Cryptic crosswords are very popular in Australia. Most Australian newspapers will have at least one cryptic crossword, if not two. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne publish daily cryptic crosswords, including Friday's challenging cryptic by 'DA' (David Astle). "Lovatts", an Australian puzzle publisher, regularly issues cryptic crossword puzzle books.
How cryptic clues work A cryptic clue leads to its answer only if it is read in the right way. What the clue appears to say when read normally (the surface reading) is usually a distraction with nothing to do with the solution. The challenge is to find the way of reading the clue that leads to the solution. A typical clue consists of two parts:
The straight or definition. This is in essence the same as any non-cryptic crossword clue: a synonym for the answer. It usually exactly matches the part of speech, tense, and number of the answer, and usually appears at the start or end of a clue. The cryptic, subsidiary indication or wordplay. This gives the solver some instructions on how to get to the answer in another (less literal) way. The wordplay parts of clues can be obscure, especially to a newcomer, but they tend to utilise standard rules and conventions which become more familiar with practice.
Sometimes the two parts of the clue are joined with a link word or phrase such as from, gives or could be. One of the tasks of the solver is to find the boundary between the definition and the wordplay, and insert a mental pause there when reading the clue cryptically.
There are many sorts of wordplay, such as anagrams and double definitions, but they all conform to rules. The crossword setters do their best to stick to these rules when writing their clues, and solvers can use these rules and conventions to help them solve the clues. Noted cryptic setter Derrick Somerset Macnutt (who wrote cryptics under the pseudonym of Ximenes) discusses the importance and art of fair cluemanship in his seminal book on cryptic crosswords, Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966, reprinted 2001).
Because a typical cryptic clue describes its answer in detail and often more than once, the solver can usually have a great deal of confidence in the answer once it has been determined. The clues are "self-checking." This is in contrast to non-cryptic crossword clues which often have several possible answers and force the solver to use the crossing letters to distinguish which was intended.
For instance "Type of tree (3)" in a regular crossword could be any of "ASH", "BAY", "ELM", "FIG", "FIR" "OAK", "YEW", etc. "Type of tree has changed (3)" in a cryptic crossword can only be "ASH".
Here is an example (taken from the Guardian crossword of 6 August 2002, set by "Shed").
15D Very sad unfinished story about rising smoke (8)
is a clue for . This breaks down as follows. 15D indicates the location and direction (down) of the solution in the grid "Very sad" is the definition "unfinished story" gives (tale with one letter missing; i.e., unfinished) "rising smoke" gives (a cigar is a "smoke", and this is a down clue so "rising" indicates that cigar should be written up the page; i.e., backwards) "about" means that the letters of should be put either side of , giving "(8)" says that the answer is a single word of eight letters.
There are many codewords or indicators that have a special meaning in the cryptic crossword context. (In the example above, "about", "unfinished" and "rising" all fall into this category). Learning these, or being able to spot them, is a useful and necessary part of becoming a skilled cryptic crossword solver.
Compilers or setters often use slang terms and abbreviations, generally without indication, so familiarity with these is important for the solver. Abbreviations may be as simple as west = W, New York = NY, but may also be more difficult. Words that can mean more than one thing are commonly exploited; often the meaning the solver must use is completely different from the one it appears to have in the clue. Some examples are:
Bloomer – often means flower (a thing that blooms). Flower – often means river (a thing that flows). Runner – also often river (a thing that runs to the sea) Lead – could be the metal, an electric cable, or the verb. Nice – if capitalized as the first word, could either be 'amiable' or the French city. Thus Nice friend often clues the letters ami. Novel – could be a book, or a word for new, or a codeword indicating an anagram. Permit – could be a noun (meaning license) or a verb (meaning allow).
Of these examples, flower is an invented meaning (using the verb flow and the suffix -er), and cannot be confirmed in a standard dictionary. A similar trick is played in the old clue "A wicked thing" for , where the -ed suffix must be understood in its 'equipped with' meaning. In the case of the '-er' suffix, this trick could be played with other meanings of the suffix, but except for river → (a river is not a 'thing that banks' but a 'thing that has banks'), this is rarely done.
Sometimes compiler, setter, or the name or codename of the compiler (if visible by the crossword), codes for some form of the first-person pronoun (I, me, my, mine).
In the Daily Telegraph back page, Monday 15 March 2017, 7 down, is "Banish spirits with zero ice upsetting imbibing times (8)"; the answer is : it means "banish spirits", and is rearranged, including (described as times). The word "upsetting" indicates an anagram and the word "imbibing" indicates an insertion. The word "with" in this clue is a linking word joining the definition with the wordplay; it is not part of either of them.
Grids for cryptic crosswords