A similar puzzle by the same authors now appears every four weeks in The Wall Street Journal, beginning in January 2010. Cryptic crosswords have become more popular in the United States in the years following the COVID-19 lockdowns with several “indie” outlets and setters. The best way to get started on a cryptic crossword, Astle said, was to look for the shortest clue.

Try to find some letters, so you can find your solution more easily. If you’ve got another answer, it would be kind of you to add it to our crossword dictionary. In contrast to all other clue types, this makes them almost impossible to disguise.

Now try our printable crosswords or our online crossword puzzles. I’d try to think through gaps I’d left in the puzzle at my desk. If I was reading and stumbled on a peculiar word or piece of trivia, I’d wonder how it could be incorporated into a puzzle. I started an Excel sheet to store possible answers, sorted by length. Most of them I wouldn’t ever use, but I imagined SLEEPERCELL and BEDROOMPOP, tied together by SHUTEYE as the reveal for a slumber-related puzzle. S website for several years, and ended with the October 2009 issue.

The question of common knowledge reenters when deciding what clue will be used to identify a fill. At first, I even struggled with the Monday puzzles—the easiest in the week. As I started reading clues, I realized uzzu tv not working I had never heard of common clues like ALEE or the Eugene O’Neill play ANNA Christie . Even though I was unable to complete them without a couple of hints, I immediately understood the appeal of a crossword.

To make clues more difficult, cryptic constructors will frequently use traditional indicator words in a misleading manner. If the two words are the same length, the clue should be phrased in such a way that only one of them can be the answer. This is usually done by having the homophone indicator adjacent to the word that is not the definition; therefore, in the previous example, “we hear” was adjacent to “twins” and the answer was pare rather than pair.