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.
Where do sheep get their wool cut? The baa-baashop!
Just kidding. Shearing or clipping is usually done by skilled shearers. A sheep may be said to be sheared or shorn, depending on the dialect, and raddle is the coloured pigment that is used to mark sheep.
The above example is just a small clipping of the countless words and phrases that stem from sheep and sheep farming [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, or certain intersecting letters won’t fit in with other words in the [more…]
In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory. She was one of the daughters of Gaia and Uranus, and as the mother of the nine Muses she represents enchantment, inspiration, and the power of remembering. She is said to know everything, past, present, and future. A mnemonic device, named from the same [more…]
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…]
