The best way to see how cryptic clues work is to look at how they don’t work. Rather than start with the curly stuff, getting too messy with manipulations, let’s focus on the so-called quick crossword. As you know, simple clues give you the answer’s definition and nothing more. Like so:
Bug (6)
No mess, no fuss, but what’s the answer?
INSECT obviously fits, yet so does HORNET and CICADA. Which guess is best?
That’s the catch: quick clues aren’t really that quick. Unless a clue is bleeding obvious—like Christmas month (8)—then you can’t guarantee which synonym will do the trick. Often the clue is too bare, giving you too little traction to test one hunch over another.
In fact, the more you contemplate bug, the longer your list grows. What about LOCUST or SPIDER? SCARAB or WEEVIL?
Or maybe it’s bug as in virus—like GRIPPE or AMOEBA, STRAIN or DENGUE.
Or possibly bug the verb, a synonym of annoy, which summons such possibilities as BOTHER or HASSLE, HARASS or BADGER, RANKLE or PESTER.
You get the gist. There’s nothing quick about a quick crossword.
Even when a letter arrives, the risks remain. Say E is confirmed as the final letter of your mystery bug, courtesy of a cross-running answer, making this pattern on paper:
__ __ __ __ __ E
Finally, a chance to pin the bug down, but even now ample suspects still remain. Words like NEEDLE or NETTLE surface, or even NIGGLE. As candidates go, you can’t blank BEETLE or RUFFLE, PLAGUE or TSETSE. One stab feels as good as the next.
Compare that muddle to a cryptic crossword. Instead of a prosaic definition, a cryptic clue offers two chances of snaring the one answer—a straight path and a twisty path that both end up at the same destination. Keeping things buggy, consider this specimen:
Squashed nicest bug (6)
Remember, don’t fall for the story. Newbies will picture some lovely butterfly splattered by a shoe, or a ladybird mushed beneath a tyre, but that is the clue’s deception. Viewing any clue as a story is diverting your brain from the challenge of solving.
So don’t be a sucker. Go below the surface. To crack a cryptic, you must abandon the literal. Be suspicious. Unpeel the picture offered and switch your brain to a lateral setting. Do it right, and you get inside the clue.
Ninety-nine per cent of cryptic clues have two parts. (Let’s not worry about the exceptions for now.) Without fail, those two parts are the definition and the wordplay. One part will define the answer—just like a quick crossword—and the other will play with the answer. Like the two parts in the brain, one hemisphere will be logical (the definition), and the other creative.
Merge them and you have a cryptic clue—a marriage of the conventional and the playful, where both parts work together to pinpoint the answer.
So long as you can work out which part is which. Let’s return to that bug situation:
Squashed nicest bug (6)
Wangling the wording one small degree, you get this:
Squashed nicest / bug (6)
As trivial as that slash might seem, it’s vital. In brain terms, it’s the fissure that separates the two hemispheres, isolates the two modes of thinking. Notice the parts aren’t the same in length? That asymmetry is common in cryptic clues and the reason I’ve been avoiding the word halves.
As a solver, the virtual surgeon on the page, you must discern where to cut. Slice the right gap and the clue will open up. A neat line, at the right point, will separate the definition from the wordplay, or vice versa, exposing the two pathways to the single answer.
Here the slash exposes the definition (bug) at the clue’s end, which means the clue’s remainder is the riddle element—the wordplay aiming at a six-letter word set to satisfy the definition. Feel free to crack either part, since the answer for both is the same.
Or solve one part, and check that answer against the other part, because cryptic clues are handy that way, allowing you to confirm your hunch, unlike those nasty quick crosswords, which can bug the brain with nothing but a dictionary grab, giving you no further means of verifying your response.
In case you haven’t guessed, the wordplay recipe found in our sample clue is the anagram. Squash NICEST, as the wordplay is telling us, and you can make a new word meaning bug. Go ahead.
Soon those six letters in NICEST will metamorphose into INSECT, the very first theory we floated when facing the quick version—but this time you know it’s right, thanks to the definition sitting next door. There’s no need to recite all those other suspects, the beetles and rankles on your list, since the cryptic clue comes with its own confirmation. How nice is that?
Anagrams, I should add, are just one style of wordplay in cryptic crosswords. Coming up are seven more types, plus more eccentric variations. But before we sample other recipes, here’s one more clue in the insect groove:
Insect plague I wager (6)
Again, you need to play surgeon, testing where to plant the scalpel. And again, the anagram formula is in action.
As an experiment, perhaps try a few different cuts? You end up with these choices:
Insect / plague I wager
Insect plague / I wager
Insect plague I / wager
Which part is most likely to provide an anagram of the answer? And which part seems to answer best as a definition?
Those questions lie central to the cryptic mindset. Sense how a clue is made, which word is playing what role, and you’re almost touching the solution. The more you dismantle the language, the sooner you’ll identify the seam that holds the parts together—the definition and the wordplay.
Or vice versa: the wordplay and the definition. Don’t forget those two parts can appear in either order. In our first example, the wordplay was first, where NICEST needed squashing. And here, in this last teaser, the definition opens the clue:
Insect plague I wager (6)
Insect or insect plague? You’d plausibly meet both in a dictionary, but in this case plague has a different role to fulfil. Here the word’s a signpost (as crossword setters call it), otherwise termed an anagram indicator, or compressed into anagrind, just like squashed in the first example.
So you’ve made it this far. What next? You obey the clue and, bearing in mind the answer is six letters long, you plague the six nearby letters I wager.
But wait, you ask. Why not plague I-N-S-E-C-T to spell the solution? That also has six letters. A fair point, though that reading would mean the answer’s definition would be the remaining I wager. Not impossible, but hardly likely.
Therefore it’s smarter to wrangle I-W-A-G-E-R, aiming for insect as the definition. Give it a whirl, literally. See what insect emerges.
Have you found it? As a bonus hint, consider a hairy listener. Too cryptic? Okay then, your solution starts with E this time. Does that help? Bug-wise, the answer’s biological order is Dermaptera, though most of us know this pincered pest as an EARWIG.
And there you have it—a brisk run-through of The Cryptic Rule of Two, the definition and the wordplay (or vice versa). To become a cryptic master, you must move away from the literal-think of simple clues, as well as simple stories, and heed the wording’s deeper purpose. Train your brain to think that way, and I guarantee the bug will bite.