Chambers 12 via Amazon now scheduled for end September. I’d be looking for a head to roll at Hodder for getting that bit of the market that wrong.

How lovely that you have joined us at 225. It’s always really appreciated when we hear from one of our Setters.

Just to put your mind at ease, however, I wasn’t for a moment trying to make anything of an (apparent) missspelling dating back more than 400 years (interesting though that might be, especially if its origins lie with the Bard – or should that now be the Earl of Oxford? Heaven Forbid!)

No, my point was that, up until now, I’ve been somewhat disappointed with what I’ve managed to find when searching the (free) “online Chambers Dictionary/Thesaurus” – so often it hasn’t yielded the same results as the printed works (fair enough of course!) Maybe that’s about to change, though, as I’ve seen tonight that there’s now a “Chambers App” available for just £4.99 on iTunes, which promises great things.

Time will tell – in any event, I’ll buy myself a copy of “the real McCoy” next time I’m back in the UK!

I got through this fairly quickly this morning, but struggled with my last one in (SUPERMINI) and was also a bit bothered by VOTRESS.

The difficulty (I won’t say “problem”) with SUPERMINI is that I keep forgetting that in Crypticland “problem” very often = “SUM”: mea culpa of course, but I’m slightly less happy that here “a” = “PER” (which I have always thought was more properly a substitute for “each”). I see that others above find this ok, so maybe risk being the only soldier in step?

AS for VOTRESS something more significant to report: this was obviously the only letter combination to work earlier today when I was doing the puzzle, but I thought that I would check it afterwards with the “online Chambers”, as it wasn’t a word that I’d encountered before. There was nothing doing there, however (“word unrecognised”) so clearly this didn’t accord with the entry in the printed version of this dictionary referred to above by nmsindy, but Google revealed an interesting footnote: apparently this “is a common misspelling” (since 1596!) of the word “votaress”. Tonight, though, when I looked again at the “online Chambers” homepage, I found that it’s undergone a complete facelift during the day, and it looks as though it might now be a much more useful source for those of us who are restricted to solving via the internet. Time will tell, but I would be interested to know what others think.

That aside, there were some very nice surfaces here – favorites included IN CAHOOTS and ROOFTOP.

Yes, this must have been a horses for courses puzzle. I found this mostly pretty straightforward and made steady progress through it. I slowed myself up by putting in ‘antenna’ initially in 17d without seeing how it parsed (mainly because it didn’t, of course). But I’m with K’s D @3 about VOTRESS the root of which I could recognize.

Thanks, Ali, for explaining 5d that I now finally understand 5d. My final one in was SUPERMINI, since for the longest time I was having a blind spot around ‘a’ = PER, a common enough usage in crosswords.

Thanks, Phi!