Crossword lover Dorothy Lyall recently asked me how I compile crosswords.
I start off with the black and white pattern of squares which we call a grid. This grid has to be carefully designed so that there are no two-letter words, not many very short or very long words (ie a reasonable number of words [more…]
Blowing in the wind
The world’s winds have wonderfully evocative names. The khamsin blows in Egypt for fifty dry, dusty days from late April. The chinook, named after a Native American tribe, blows a warm, dry wind through the Rocky Mountains. The mistral, meaning master wind, blows strong and cold through Southern France and the [more…]
I’ve been meaning to write to you to thank you profusely for the $50 I received from you for a win in one of your lovely competitions!! It arrived in time to give me a lift … my beautiful husband had just been run over by a little old man parked in a disabled bay [more…]
Juan Belmonte, Antonio Ordonez and El Cordobes are names of great matadors. A matador, dressed ornately in a gold embroidered silk jacket, faces the bull in the ring, on foot, with no weapon but his cape. The more risks that are taken by the matador, the happier the crowd.
A horseback bullfighter is a PICADOR. [more…]
When it comes to writing crossword clues, we have to be very careful when describing a word, especially when there’s another word with a similar meaning. Fortunately the other word is usually of a different length and wouldn’t fit the clue space.
However, we try to be as accurate as possible, and there are some [more…]
We hear some amazing real-life stories from our readers.
Here’s the story of Lynette Anesbury, who used our crosswords to retrain her brain.
Lynette has been doing crosswords since she was ten. A family friend introduced her to crosswords in the paper. They started having races to see who could finish the newspaper crossword first. She [more…]
The word cutlery comes from the Old French word coutellerie (related to today’s French word couteau ‘knife’) yet the words knife, fork and spoon are all from Old English. The knife was by far the earliest of the cutlery items.
The word knife comes from the Old English cnif, and the first knives would have [more…]
One of the happiest occasions that happens in a family is a wedding, which incidentally comes from the old English weddian ‘to pledge to do something’.
My son Patrick’s recent wedding was no exception. On a sunny afternoon in our local church, 150 family and friends gathered to see Patrick and Sarah marry and [more…]
Toff – ‘a rich or upper class person’.
University dress includes an academic cap, or mortarboard, with a black tassel. At Oxford and Cambridge from around the 1600s the titled young undergraduates began to wear gold tassels, known as tufts, as a mark of their superior status.
As often happens with language, the word’s usage [more…]
