My first Azed. Definitely hard work: I invested at least 3 hours total. The vast majority of words I had to extract from Chambers. Azed’s saving grace is meticulous clueing – and, in the case of the unusual, almost verbatim definitions from The Big Red Book. The only words I unequivocally knew (more or less in the sense intended) were: NAPPY, LYSOL, GOLEM, PASCAL, MUSCAT, GATEAU, HULA, SALT, MARTYR. That left a lot of Chamber-trawling. The wordplay for MARTYR has me stymied, though Linxit below has a theory.   I hope this is considered a relatively hard Azed…

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A bit easier than last week’s Nimrod I think but there were still a few I didn’t understand. I’m obviously not tuned in to the Nimrodian frequency at the moment but that didn’t stop me enjoying this. Read the rest of this entry »

Solving time: 20:01. One mistake (2dn) so the last 3 of those minutes were wasted!

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