Disorderly dongle reportedly flees nautical target (6, 6)
g old en The first time I sat down with a cryptic crossword, I Cryptic clues are dense little tangles of wordplay, and solving one feels like teasing apart a knot of golden thread. They are elegant, tricky, and incredibly rewarding. They are phrases, like the one above, containing both a definition of the answer (the "straight" part of the clue) and a set of instructions encoded in wordplay that lead to the same answer (the "cryptic" part). As dense as cryptic clues are, I find cryptic crosswords to be relatively porous. Black squares tend to fall in a lattice which forms pockets of letters cued only by a single clue. As I'm writing this, only 27/75 (36%) of The Guardian's Quick Cryptic's white squares are placed at the intersection of two clues. shoutout Minute Cryptic and The Guardian's Quick Cryptic The properties of a crossword as I see them are, in order of my own perceived importance:- Every answer is cued by at least two pieces of information
- Solving one clue helps in the solving of other clues
- Every cell contains one letter (or occasionally more)
Cryptic crosswords satisfy the first point, but they do so in a different way than a standard crossword. In a cryptic crossword, a given cell is cued by the straight and cryptic portions of a single clue. In a standard crossword, every cell is a member of two distinct solutions, and is cued by their respective clues. While there are overlapping elements in a cryptic crossword, knowing that "Disorderly dongle reportedly flees nautical target (6,6)" has an L in the third space and ends with an E only helps so much considering the amount of obfuscation inherent in cryptic clues.
Explanation of cryptic clue above: goAl + deAn + fleece