Once our wonderful crossword and puzzle magazines are shipped to your door, or placed on store shelves, it’s not long before our puzzlers write in to share their thoughts and questions. Here at Lovatts, we encourage your feedback, and we love talking about our clues. I thought I’d share my findings inspired by a recent clue query.

In this case, the clue was ‘Shoo-in’, and the answer was CERT. Originally shoo-in denoted the winner of a rigged horse race back in the 1930s and came to mean ‘a person or thing that is certain to succeed, especially someone who is certain to win a competition’, as in ‘the horse/person was shooed in’.

Cert is defined as ‘an event regarded as inevitable’, or ‘a racehorse strongly tipped to win a race’.

While these two meanings are not exactly the same, we feel they are close enough. After all, a clue is just that – a nudge in the right direction.

Few synonyms have exactly the same meaning. Is a bowl of soup the same as a dish of soup? We sometimes clue ‘bowl’ as ‘dish’ and vice versa but they’re not quite the same.

If two words meant exactly the same, one would fall out of use eventually.

Take clumsy and awkward – they could be seen as synonyms, but you might have an awkward situation which you certainly wouldn’t describe as a clumsy situation.

Another clue queried was ‘Enshrine’ for the answer HALLOW. It’s a very good question and I’m grateful to our puzzlers for pointing this out. Hallow is defined as ‘to make holy, consecrate, greatly revere and honour’ while enshrine is ‘to hold as sacred, cherish, treasure’. They are not identical, but I feel they convey the same meaning.

I’ve talked before about canoe and kayak – not quite the same but a close enough clue. Kayakers will tell us that the canoe is an open-top boat while the kayak usually has a closed top.

Also spade and shovel – the professional gardener will know that a spade is for digging, a shovel for scooping.

A synonym is defined as a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word. Is there a synonym for synonym? Well, there is metonym, which is a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated, such as brass for military officers, Westminster for the British government or suits for business executives and lawyers.

Happy Puzzling!