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.
We have a winner! Congratulations to Christine H for winning $5,000 in the Lovatts Crosswords & Puzzles $100,000 Magic Money competition.
Like the $100K Cash Splash before it, the Magic Money draw was a fantastic chance for Christine and the Lovatts Crosswords & Puzzles team to meet one of our wonderful and loyal Lovatts puzzlers in person. It [more…]
The DIY has been one of our most popular contests in Christine’s BIG Crossword magazine for years and the team and I are always amazed at how clever the entries are.
We are always overwhelmed by the huge effort all our DIY contest entrants make to create a crossword and write the clues. When [more…]
German geophysicist Alfred Wegener was the first to advance the idea, in 1912, that the continents were slowly drifting around the Earth, and coined the term Continental Drift but this idea was not accepted until the 1950s.
Ancient Greek mariners were the first to make a distinction between continents, when they gave [more…]
The noun ‘moon’ is thought to derive from the Proto-Indo-European mēnsis, meaning ‘month’. The moon’s waxing and waning have made it a symbol of time, change, and repetitive cycles around the world, such as the cycle of birth and death.
The moon has been personified in various myths and legends from across the world, such [more…]
Although Shakespeare wrote his plays over 400 years ago, in some ways the world he wrote about has hardly dated. For instance, the plants he referred to in his plays are the same ones we’re familiar with today.
In his Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon tells Puck to squeeze the juice of a flower onto the [more…]
Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Where would we be without punctuation? If we didn’t have any, the sentence
“Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off”
would leave you wondering. Instead the sentence should [more…]
Christmas words often appear in our crosswords even outside of the season. The word Christmas can sometimes be clued as ‘Noël’, ‘Yuletide’, or ‘Present-giving occasion’.
Noël is a French word from the Latin nātālis meaning ‘a birth’. ‘Natale domini’ is another Latin phrase related to nātālis, meaning ‘birth of the Lord’. The given name Natalie [more…]
In Japan, for example, celebrating Christmas has only become widely celebrated in the last few decades, and because there isn’t a high population of Christians in Japan, it is seen as more of a family celebration than a religious holiday. One Christmas Eve and Christmas Day tradition in Japan is the eating of fried [more…]
