Here's a Puzzle Entirely Made of Anagrams
Everything you need to know about anagram clues
My plan here is to do a few small weekend puzzles over the next month that focus on just one or two specific types of cryptic clue as a way of building up to standard-size puzzles that mix all the different clue types together. But before I get to today’s mini-puzzle — a word on “surfaces.” A cryptic clue is often called a “surface” by the cool kids because good cryptic clues have a “surface” meaning, which is to say that they scan like a coherent thought (albeit usually the type of thought that you might expect from someone who is only pretending to be a human being and hasn’t quite ironed out all the kinks yet). The “surface” of a clue is (almost!) always misleading, and you should (usually!) ignore it, or at the very least treat it with extreme skepticism. The real activity of a cryptic puzzle is happening beneath the surface, and the trick to cryptics is learning to see those machinations independently from the preposterous red herring that is generated by the surface of the clue.
I’m going to demonstrate this with three anagrammatic clues. The anagram is one of (roughly) six common clue types in a standard cryptic, and it has the advantage of being the easiest to spot (unless the setter is being particularly bloodyminded or clever about it). You will note that there are three distinct things going on in the clues below. These three parts tend to occur in most types of clue, not just anagrams: 1) The surface meaning, which (except in the case of the third clue below), you should entirely ignore. 2) The cryptic instructions (beneath the surface, each clue is giving you a secret set of instructions to help you decipher the answer). 3) The definition, which is usually a word or phrase at the beginning or end of a clue (I can’t emphasize enough how useful it is to know this!) that means the same thing as the answer.
Mega sword deployed in Scrabble tournaments (4, 5)
Lovely farce both creative and irritatingly smart (3, 6, 2, 4)
Disordered, a tragic man am I (12)
Each of these three clues has an anagram indicator — a word or phrase that’s telling you to rearrange the preceding or succeeding words to arrive at your answer. In clue #1, that indicator is “deployed.” The clue is asking you to “deploy” (technically, redeploy) “Mega sword” to get an answer that means the same thing as the clue’s definition, which is “Scrabble tournaments.” And it turns out that you can rearrange “Mega sword” to be “Word Games,” which is the correct answer. Repunctuated slightly, this is:
“Mega sword” deployed IN: Scrabble Tournaments [Word Games]
In Clue #2, the anagram indicator is “creative” — it’s a bit more metaphorical here, but if one were to be particularly creative in one’s spelling of “Lovely farce both,” one might arrive at the phrase “Too Clever By Half,” an answer that matches our definition, “Irritatingly smart.”
“Lovely farce both” creative AND: Irritatingly Smart [Too Clever By Half]
Clue #3’s anagram indicator is the most straightforward of all, though the definition is being a little bit tricky. “Disordered” letters are the definition of an anagram, and if you “disorder” the letters “A tragic man am,” you will arrive at your answer, “Anagrammatic,” which matches our definition, “I,” referring to the clue itself, which is anagrammatic. It’s kind of an ouroboros and maybe not even a totally fair clue, but as a guy I dislike used to memorably say whenever he was called out for being obnoxious, “You gotta laugh sometimes!”
Disordered “a tragic man am”: I [Anagrammatic]
Anyway, I’ve made a small cryptic puzzle for you that is all anagrams. My grandmother — to whom I owe my love of cryptic puzzles — always advised me to try and spot the anagram clues in a puzzle first, so you have a bit of a foundation to build on. This is good advice, because once you learn to see them, they really jump out at you, and all you need to do to spot them is to keep your eyes out for an anagram indicator and then count the letters of the following (or preceding) words to see if they match the number of letters required for your answer.
I’ll say, finally, that anagram indicators (somewhat obnoxiously called “anagrinds” by the cool kids) tend to fall into a few different types: Words or phrases that mean ordering or reordering (disordered, jumbled, muddled, etc.); words or phrases that mean impaired or mentally disordered (drunk, insane, lunatic, angry, sad, agitated); words or phrases that imply a mishmash (soup, salad, mess, etc.); prepositions that imply some kind of shake-up (up, around, about, etc.); and words or phrases that mean wrong (wild, stupid, absurd, mistaken, odd, unlikely). And honestly, plenty more! But they really do start to jump out at you after a while.
Anyway, here’s a puzzle. The puzzle image is below if you want to print it out like our forebears used to, but you can also fill it in with a click! Once you’ve finished the puzzle, you can find a solution and explanation to each of the clues here!
For part two of this series explaining cryptic clues, go here.
