Here you'll find a variety of puzzle themed items and pieces of information to hold your interest. Learn about some of the wonderful words and phrases in our everyday language, find out about the health benefits of crosswords and puzzles, be entertained by Christine's Hello column… and there's much more on offer. The latest submissions appear below. Thanks for dropping by and we hope you enjoy your visit.
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…]
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…]
This article appeared in Woman’s Day 14/3/2012:
Get the Kids Cross-Training
We’ve all heard doing the Woman’s Day crossword may help ward of dementia, but did you know the crusical age to engage your brain is between six and 40?
Researchers at the University of California surveyed 65 adults with an average age of 76 and found [more…]
Hula hoops, beehive hairdos, pet rocks, lava lamps and the Brady Bunch all had their day in the spotlight but were they all just passing fancies?
This relatively recent expression comes from American advertising posters of the 1930s. It became popular with ice cream companies who saw a flavour-of-the-month as a great marketing idea.
Often the [more…]
If you send someone to Coventry, you ignore them or ostracise them from your group. It is form of a playground bullying and also used to punish strike-breakers.
Why Coventry?
During the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, Cromwell sent Royalist soldiers to be imprisoned in this cathedral city in Warwickshire, England. They were shunned by [more…]
Stows away in the shop
Let’s start with clue 169dn in the Stinker, which was a little ambiguous. ‘Stores’ suggests a few different answers including two that fitted the spaces on our grid; the noun SHOPS, places you buy things, or the verb STOWS, stashes away. We accepted both answers.
One of the world’s endangered animals [more…]
Flying through the clues
We were faced with a bit of a dilemma in the Bigcash. The usual English spelling for ‘Small handbill’ is FLYER but quite a few entries had FLIER. This is more common in American English, but as it is a variant spelling and does appear in some dictionaries, we had to [more…]
Beware Greeks bearing clues
One of my favourite tales from Ancient Greece is that of the wooden horse. Devised by Odysseus after years of unsuccessful attempts to enter Troy, Greek soldiers hid inside a large wooden horse while the rest of their army pretended to give up and sail away. The Trojans were persuaded to [more…]
Clues we might use for this word include ‘Night-time outings restriction’ or ‘After-hours travel ban’, but a curfew started as a law aimed at preventing villages burning down.
The word’s origin is in the Old French couvre-feu meaning ‘cover-fire’. In medieval times fires were precious for lighting, heating and cooking. Crude wooden houses with thatched [more…]
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