The New York Times Will Shortz's Wittiest, Wackiest Crosswords: 225 Puzzles from the Will Shortz Crossword Collection

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I looked it up. There are 22 places called Salem in the US, the most famous being the one with the witch trials. It’s also the capital of Oregon and a small town in my own state (Connecticut) I didn’t even know how to find on a map. LOW YEAR)* – the Royal We was Queen Victoria’s way of referring to herself (as in the apocryphal “we are not amused”), or her “one”, as formerly used by the more recent late Queen

For all newspaper-published crosswords that appear online from Wednesday 10 February 2010 a PDF version will appear beneath the crossword’s title and alongside the Print version and the Blind & PS version. LEI[sure] (holiday) minus ‘sure’ (certain): a garland given as a gift to visitors to Hawaii – see here Now that’s off my chest: I actually found this mostly enjoyable and a touch easier than previous from the same setter. I needed help with TITOIST (would never have got there on my own, to be fair) but almost all the rest was a steady, reasonably challenging solve, albeit with some solutions from definition and crossers without really understanding the parsing til I got here. I noticed three Frenchisms which suited this Francophone but may have been a little trop for some…I still think that GREAT BRITAIN is an island but not a country, since the country in question includes Northern Ireland. If Scotland secedes it will be even less so.

C (chapter) + an anagram (about) of FOUR – I have happy memories of visiting these delightful locations (worth a look) on a holiday in Corfu Cryptic definition, a boater being a kind of hat, the question mark indicating definition by example The eccentricity of an ellipse is denoted by e. It is the ratio of the distances from the centre of the ellipse to one of the foci and to one of the vertices of the ellipse, i.e., e = c/a where a is the length of semi-major axis and c is the distance from centre to the foci. There was some great clueing in this and, after yesterday’s DYNASTY, we have HAN used as a partial, today. I thought 1d ( ANGEL CAKE ) was an extremely clever clue. However, I have three downers !I can’t believe I filled in this whole puzzle when I only got 4 and 6 down at the start. The first of those gave me THE in 13a and which with the word count gave me A _ _ _ _ _ (in?) THE _ _ _. which the wordplay helped with, and I inched on from there. It took me a long time to think of looking up the unlikely-looking ARCING, which I couldn’t explain: There are a number of neat anagrams and some witty definitions and deft misdirection, with great surfaces all round. Atlanta Dave @59 – I thought the same (and given your parenthetical remarks you might want to skip the rest of this post 😉 ) Edit – thanks to KVa and Alan C: a reversal (up, in a down clue) of LEG (pin) + C in A lot of NAKE[d] (raw)

This is designed for blind or partially-sighted users. It is a stripped down text version, which should be easily read by a screen reader. Which crosswords have competitions? Second downer is re 20a. Although I’m a maths grad and I recognise the “below”, imho it’s wrong to include “e” for eccentricity in a cryptic of this nature CORPS (large body) + a reversal (turned up, in a down clue) of DE (of French) – I remember this definition being unfamiliar to some solvers in previous blogs: it’s a word we used often used at schoolMy favourites, from a fine set of clues, were 1ac DANISH, 9ac SEVERE, 14 BREATHLESS, 18ac ENCOURAGED, 22ac UPSTREAm, 2dn NOVEMBER, 3dn STRENGTH, 5dn DEPRESSION and 17dn EDUCATOR. The PDF option will still show if it was available on the old crosswords before they were moved over to our new platform. How do I print a crossword? DE (inDEed at heart, which took a minute or two to work out – nice misdirection) + PRESS) (iron) + I[r]ON) minus r (right) The cryptic grammar (I follow) doesn’t quite work here – a pity, since the setter dealt with I effectively in the previous clue and in 8dn muffin @53 – I would see ‘apply’ (with qm) as one of Paul’s whimsical adjectival constructs, like ‘jetty’ = ‘a bit like a jet’. Fwiw Wiktionary has apply as an alternative spelling of appley. And come to think of it, if stubble can be stubbly, and a bobble can be bobbly, why can’t an apple be apply?