How to solve a cryptic crossword clue, starting from zero

Cryptic crosswords have a reputation problem. They look like a private joke you weren't around for, and most people bounce off them once and conclude they're not clever enough.

They're not a test of cleverness. They're a test of whether you know the rules — and there are about eight of them.

The one idea everything else hangs off

Every cryptic clue is two clues welded together, both pointing at the same answer.

One end is a straight definition, exactly like a normal crossword clue. The other end is wordplay that builds the answer letter by letter, a completely different way. They sit next to each other with no punctuation to tell you where one stops.

So your first move on any clue is never "what's the answer". It's find the seam.

The definition is almost always at the very start or the very end of the clue. Never the middle. So there are only two places to try, and you can test both in about four seconds.

Flower of London (6)

Split at the front: "Flower" is the definition, "of London" is the wordplay. Split at the back: "London" is the definition, "flower of" is the wordplay. The second one is right — and "flower" is doing the classic cryptic thing of meaning something that flows. The answer is THAMES.

That's the entire discipline. Everything below is just a catalogue of what the wordplay half can be doing.

The eight devices

1. Anagram

The most common by a distance. Some word in the clue means "mixed up" — confused, broken, drunk, cooked, wild, oddly, arranged, terrible — and the letters to rearrange are sitting right next to it.

Broken heart is the world (5)

"Broken" flags the anagram. The fodder is HEART, which is five letters — matching the enumeration, which is how you know you've split the clue correctly. Rearranged: EARTH. The definition is "the world".

Count the fodder before you try to rearrange it. If the letters next to the anagram indicator don't add up to the number in brackets, you've split the clue in the wrong place — and that single check kills most wrong turns before you waste a minute on them.

2. Hidden word

The answer is sitting in plain sight, spanning two or three consecutive words. Flagged by in, some, part of, held by, covered by.

Some drama zings — astonishing! (7)

"Some" is the flag, so stop thinking and start reading letters across the word boundaries: drAMA ZINGs. AMAZING, defined by "astonishing".

These are the clues people kick themselves over, because no cleverness is involved at all — only whether you noticed the flag. When you see one, run a finger along the letters. It's mechanical.

3. Charade

The answer is built from smaller pieces stuck end to end, each clued separately.

Father, for each, gets a newspaper (5)

PA (father) + PER (for each) = PAPER, defined by "newspaper".

Charades are why regular solvers know that "sailor" is AB or TAR, "doctor" is MO or DR, "learner" is L, "the French" is LE or LA, and "about" is RE or CA. It's a vocabulary you have to acquire, but it's small and it's fixed — a page of it covers almost everything you'll meet.

4. Container

One piece goes inside another. Flagged by in, inside, holding, swallowing, around, about, eating.

5. Reversal

A word backwards. Flagged by back, returning, up (in a down clue), retreating, over. STAR reversed is RATS; DRAWER is REWARD.

6. Deletion

Take a letter off. Headless removes the first, endless the last, heartless the middle.

7. Homophone

Sounds like something else. Flagged by we hear, reportedly, on the radio, said, aloud.

8. Double definition

The whole clue is two straight definitions, side by side, with no wordplay at all. Usually short and usually the ones that make you groan.

Ring, call (5)

PHONE, twice over — "ring" and "call" both define it, and there's no wordplay to unpick. Very short clues, two or three words, are almost always this. If a clue seems to have nothing in it, that's the answer: there's nothing in it.

The three habits that matter more than the list

Trust the enumeration. The number in brackets is the most under-used information in the clue. It tells you how long the anagram fodder has to be, whether a charade needs two pieces or three, and it eliminates most wrong guesses before you've written anything.

Ignore the surface meaning. A good clue reads as a sensible English sentence, and that sentence is a lie designed to make you think about the wrong thing. "Drunk actor" is not about an actor. The moment a clue makes vivid narrative sense, be more suspicious, not less.

Suspect the odd word. Cryptic clues are compressed to the point of awkwardness. If a word is doing nothing for the sentence — a stray "about", a strange "back", an unnecessary "we hear" — it isn't padding. It's an instruction.

How to actually get better

Not by doing more crosswords. By doing fewer clues, properly.

Take one clue you couldn't get, find the answer, and then work out why. Reverse-engineering a clue you've failed teaches you far more than solving three you found easy, because the thing you're building is a library of devices, and you only add to it at the moment something surprises you.

Most people need about thirty of those before cryptics stop feeling like a foreign language. That's a couple of weeks, not a couple of years — which is the actual reason the reputation is unfair.

One warning about racing

Cryptics reward pattern recognition, and pattern recognition compounds. That means the gap between a beginner and someone who does one daily is enormous at first and then closes fast.

If you're racing someone who solves cryptics every morning, race them at a straight grid until you've got the seams. Losing by four minutes teaches you nothing. Losing by twenty seconds teaches you everything.