We’re celebrating our first full year of Defector crosswords with a slightly different kind of puzzle than you’re used to, a cryptic by Hoang-Kim Vu. Kim works in global public health in Washington, D.C., and is a member of the crossword editing team at Defector and AVCX. His puzzles have appeared in numerous outlets, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week, but thanks for solving along. It’s been a fun year of puzzles.
Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. Launched 16 years ago as the house crossword of The Onion, the AVCX not only offers weekly standard crosswords, but also midi puzzles, a cryptic, a themeless offering, and a trivia contest. Like Defector, AVCX is an independent venture with a fresher sensibility than mainstream outlets, and is committed to diversity in its masthead, fair pay to our contributors, and a fiercely progressive streak. And like Defector, the AVCX relies on subscriptions from solvers like you. If you like Defector's puzzles, please consider a subscription with the AVCX.
You may have been expecting a normal Monday crossword today, but instead, a cryptic crossword! Cryptic crosswords are a variety of crossword that are super popular among Brits—and are in fact the dominant form of crosswords across the pond—but are also popular among crossword sickos here, too. In fact, it was noted crossword sicko Stephen Sondheim—who I'm told also wrote musicals?—who is usually credited with introducing American audiences to cryptics via puzzles in New York Magazine in the 1960s. Why do people love cryptics? Because they're trickier, but also therefore incredibly satisfying to crack.
So what makes a cryptic different from a standard American crossword? The clues! Each clue in a cryptic crossword can be broken down into two parts: a definition and wordplay, in any order, with no extra unused words in the clue, other than the occasional linking word. The definition part is the easiest for regular crossword solvers to understand: It's what might appear in an American crossword as the full clue: a synonym or pun or hint toward the word or phrase in question.
The wordplay is the trickier part. This half of the clue hints at wordplay that leads you to the exact same word or phrase as the definition. This might be an anagram, a charade, homophones, or other types of word rearrangement. So for example, a clue for the word NOTICES might be [Spots section in disarray (7)] or [Warnings, not guarantees (7)]. In the first clue, [spots] is the definition (as in to notice something), while [section in disarray] is the wordplay with SECTION providing letters to be anagrammed, and [in disarray] indicating an anagram. In the second, [warnings] is the definition, while the charade is literally [NOT], plus ICES, a synonym for [guarantees], as in icing the end of a game.
Lastly, to help solvers out, each clue is followed by an enumeration, which simply tells you how an answer should be parsed, so something like ZILLOWING OUT would be shown as (9,3).
Anyway, at least a few of you sickos asked for it, so as a little treat, here's a cryptic. Good luck! - Kim
Psst! If you’re looking for answer explanations, you can find them HERE.
