Crossword tricks: how to finish one instead of filling in half
Start with the short ones and the plurals, read the clue twice looking for the trick, and the letter patterns that narrow a word down in English.
A blank crossword is intimidating. Thirty clues, none of them obvious, and the feeling that whoever wrote it knows far more words than you. That feeling is almost always false: crosswords are not solved by knowing more vocabulary, they are solved in the right order and by learning to read how the setter thinks.
These are the habits that separate someone who fills in half from someone who finishes.
Start with the short ones and the plurals
Do not read the clues top to bottom. Take a quick pass looking for two things:
- Three and four letter words. There are very few possible options and they tend to be crossword vocabulary that recurs (river names, musical notes, Greek letters, abbreviations).
- Plural clues. If the clue is plural, the answer almost always ends in S. An S placed in a cell crossing two other words is worth far more than it looks.
Every letter you place does not solve one word: it solves part of two. That is the whole mechanic of a crossword, and it is why starting with the cheap stuff pays, even if it is unspectacular.
Read the clue twice, looking for the trick
The bulk of a crossword's difficulty is not in the vocabulary, it is that the clue is written to mislead. The devices are nearly always the same:
- Double meaning. «Bank» can be the one in the park, the one with money or the one by the river. «Spring» can be the season, the coil or the water source.
- Part of speech. If the clue is «Cuts hair», the answer might be a verb (
TRIMS) or a trade (BARBER). Look at how many cells there are: that decides it. - Hidden abbreviations. «Compass point» is almost always one or two letters. «In Roman numerals» warns you the answer is not a word.
- The singular or plural of the clue itself. «Domestic animal» and «Domestic animals» are not answered the same way.
When a clue resists, ask yourself what other sense the key word has. Nine times out of ten the deadlock is there.
Count the cells before writing
It sounds obvious and almost nobody does it. You have the answer in your head, you write it, and it does not fit by one letter. Then that wrongly placed word contaminates four crossings and you spend fifteen minutes fighting a mistake of your own making.
Count. Always. And if you have two candidates of the same length, write neither until a crossing tells you which.
Write lightly, or in mental pencil
When you are reasonably sure but not certain, mark the word somehow to remind you it is provisional. On paper, lighter. On screen, remember it. The reason: the costliest mistake in a crossword is not leaving a gap, it is accepting a word that is wrong. A gap you can see; a false word you believe, and it blocks everything crossing it.
Attack the areas, not the crossword
A crossword is not a list of thirty independent problems, it is a map of connected areas. Once you have three or four words together, stay there and work the area: every new letter narrows its neighbours.
Jumping from one corner to the opposite one every time you get stuck is what produces that feeling of going round in circles without progress.
Deduce from the letter pattern
When you have a word half done, stop thinking about the clue and look at the pattern. With _A_ANA and six cells, English does not offer that many options. It helps to know a few things about the language:
- Q is virtually always followed by U.
- Every English word has a vowel, and almost every one of six letters or more has at least two.
- A common ending in a plural or a verb: -S, -ED, -ING, -ER, -EST, -TION, -NESS. If the last three cells are free and the clue is an action, try -ING.
- A six-letter word starting with UN-, IN-, DIS- or MIS- is usually a negative, and the clue will hint at it.
- Q, J, X and Z almost never appear twice in the same word, and rarely at the end.
And when you have been stuck for twenty minutes
Three things, in this order:
- Re-read the clues you had already accepted. Looking for errors, not confirmation. It is astonishing how often the deadlock is a word you placed half an hour ago.
- Change area. Even though you have just decided not to. A fresh area can hand you a letter that unlocks the previous one from the other side.
- Leave it for twenty minutes. The brain keeps working in the background and that is not a figure of speech: it is one of the better established findings in problem solving. When you come back, the impossible clue is no longer impossible.
How you actually improve
By solving regularly, not in marathons. Crossword vocabulary — those words that only exist there — is learned by repetition, and within two or three weeks of one a day you start recognising each setter's recurring clues.
The other thing that helps a lot is mixing in other word puzzles. Anagrams train exactly the muscle you need to deduce a word from an incomplete pattern of letters, which is half the work of a crossword.
MenteBrillante gives you a new crossword every day alongside fourteen other puzzles, free in the browser with nothing to install. There are also free online crosswords with no sign-up, and if you are curious about where the format came from, the history of the crossword has a good story behind it.