Never knowingly undersolved
I was a little surprised when I saw that this puzzle was a special, but there turned out to be a good reason for it. Letters Latent is one of the “classics”, apparently … Read more >>
Azed has been kind with the vocabulary this week, I did not spend nearly as much time inside Chambers as usual. A very enjoyable puzzle, thank you Azed.
With apologies for the delay, here is last week’s plain puzzle.
A competition puzzle this week, but it is just a plain one. After I got ALPHABET SOUP at 1 across, a lot of the down entries that fed off it … Read more >>
Another very enjoyable excursion through the lesser-visited areas of the dictionary led by our expert guide Azed. Thank you Azed.
I always err in these Azed blogs on the side of giving rather too little information: anyone who is going to look at them will have a copy of Chambers to hand and will be able to understand the incredibly unusual words both in the answers and in the clues. the actual parsing is usually fairly simple. Sometimes I forget the definition in the time between doing the puzzle and doing the blog, but once one has given the wordplay the definition is usually obvious.
But what about those people who are new to Azed solving and want to have the clues properly explained? Well to them I say get a copy of Chambers. And if the price puts you off, the version for the smartphone is a fraction of the price and so far as I can see contains basically the whole of the new edition.
In contrast to my usual method of solving Azed over Sunday breakfast, I did this one intermittently while on a walking holiday on Scotland, so it’s hard to tell how its difficulty compares … Read more >>
I had heard of Playfair crosswords but had not seen one before now. I found Azed’s instructions comprehensive but not very easy to understand so I looked up Playfair on the Web. Also a few typos have crept back into the on-line PDF which did not help matters. Fortunately another quick look on the web turned up what has to be done: the clue text for 1, 19, 23 and 37 across needs to be italicised; the clue for 23 across is wrongly numbered as 22 across; the letter count for 16 down is 3 not 4.
Another plain 12 x 12 puzzle from Azed this week.
A plain Azed puzzle for us this time This was a fairly standard Azed puzzle with precise cluing. The format of the clues is rarely different from those you find … Read more >>
Either I’ve been doing this long enough to actually have improved or… (more likely) this was on the easier end of the Azed spectrum. In any event, finished this off in about an hour (v. fast for me) without overly abusing Chambers.
In a few cases (14ac, 19dn, 25dn, 27dn) Azed has produced clues of the highest quality, clues that would I’m sure be quoted in his own clue-setting competitions, but many of the rest, as is always the case with Azed, are, although perfectly sound and quite pleasant, very simple in their construction and the answers are only difficult to find because they require knowledge of words that are way beyond the ken of the solver on the Clapham omnibus. Which is as it should be. He is not intended to be solved on the C. o.
Definitions underlined and in maroon.
There seems to be a higher-than-usual proportion of unfamiliar words in this puzzle, but despite that I managed to finish it quite quickly without aids (though a couple of my plausible guesses turned … Read more >>
Super puzzle and an enjoyable change form the standard Sunday fare. Thank you Azed.
A more than usually eclectic mix of words from Azed this week.