This was a a fairly standard plain Azed puzzle with his usual high quality cluing.

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Harder than usual even for an Azed.  I had to check the BRB for well over half of the answers.  OK I’m lying.  Closer to 80%.  A couple of unsolved wordplays await within.

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The usual excellent crossword from Azed and as usual I won’t give detailed descriptions of all the very unusual words, in the knowledge that anyone interested enough in this crossword to look here will have a copy of Chambers. Read the rest of this entry »

Another moderately easy Azed to start the new year, where I was helped by getting the long answer at 1d. Unusually I have a couple of nitpicks (15a and 21d) but apart from that it’s the usual high-quality stuff.

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Nick:  Fairly tough today, 8/10.

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This year Azed’s Christmas puzzle combined an old favourite (although not of all solvers), Printer’s Devilry,  for the across clues, with something entirely new for the down clues. These were normal clues made more complex by the addition of a jumble of consecutive letters referring to the equivalent across clue (in sequential order). I can only wonder at the effort this must have involved. The effect, strangely, was perhaps to make the puzzle rather easier to solve than had all the clues been PD.

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Another very sound set of clues from Azed, making full use of the more obscure meanings of words.  You always know where you stand with Azed.  If you feel unhappy with the parsing then you probably haven’t got it right.  There were a couple of clues here that took me more than one attempt to parse to my own satisfaction.  As I result I found even more meanings of everyday words.

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I solved this early in the week… but forgot to write up my notes until early this morning.  So I’m regressing to the mean: after a reasonably long spell of decoding all of Azed’s wordplays, a couple escape me this week.

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Again a lovely sound crossword from Azed. I won’t waste time by copying out Chambers but as usual will confine myself to trying to explain how the clues work, something that wasn’t always clear at first. But that always happens with Azed’s crosswords. Sooner or later you manage and I think I’ve more or less understood them all now. Read the rest of this entry »

The first thing that struck me about this puzzle was the unusually open grid, with wide open unbarred spaces, especially in the NE and SW corners. The two 13-letter across answers have only two unchecked letters each, instead of the more usual four. Just as remarkably, Azed has managed to fit in a generous helping of familiar (or a least reasonable-looking) words. Perhaps as a result of these two features, I found the puzzle very much at the easy end of the spectrum, almost finishing it without aids in about 40 minutes, and then needing just a little dictionary-hunting to finish off a few stragglers. The grid may be unusual, but the clueing is as sound and imganitive as ever.

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Nick:  A fairly difficult Azed this week being a Letters Latent puzzle.

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A reasonably straightforward Azed this week, with no particular problems (except one!) and a very friendly grid (only 2 unches in an 11 letter word).  The problem is 10 across, which refers to Moby-Dick, but in a way equally as obscure (to me, anyway) as that great novel can be.  Suggestions please.  Here’s a link to the pdf of the puzzle as printed. Read the rest of this entry »

This was a standard Azed competition puzzle in that all the clues were normal, except for the one entry that has to be clued by competitiors withm their submissions.

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Might be wrong about this but seems like Azed has eschewed Scots terms for the duration.  Of this puzzle at least.  In favour of Latin and Greek.
Across
1 BI(O)AS,SAY
7 AM(B)O – my first clue.  I remembered that AMO is Latin “I love” (which I didn’t).  And AMBO is an “early Christian pulpit”.
10 A,POTRO*,PA,IC – “turning aside evil”.  I suppose PA is our governor.
11 GR(ILL)ADE – archaic fodder for the grill
13 WET,A – a (venomous) NZ grasshopper and A=Australia.  Rather nice clue.
14 MIN(C)E – where egg=[land]mine
17 R,A,TAN – rattan cane.  R=Bunter’s rear (last letter).
18 C(ALAS)H – CH=courthouse.  CALASH=light carriage
21 T(RIT)O,N – applied to ship (figuratively).   Think I’ve parsed the wordplay correctly: RIT.=slowing down (musically speaking).
22 RE(I)KI[h] – one=I in rev([h]IKER)
23 PIL(SEN)ER – SEN=Japanese coins (coppers) in peril* and amber liquid is beer.
26 A(TOP)Y – ay=always.  And ATOPY=hypersensitivity.
28 SITE=”sight” (a great many)
29 HET*,A(I)RIA – a club/society (obs.)
30 ANIMA MUNDI – (amid numina)* – “soul of the world”.
31 WAS,E – “pad on the head to ease the pressure of a burden” thus “Something to ease capital pressure”.  Clever wordplay:  “is no longer”=WAS, “no. 1 for economy”=E.
32 AB,STERGE – scour.  rev(egrets).

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As always with Azed, thoroughly sound clues and much wading through Chambers in a chase for words that one has never heard, frequently finding variant spellings and having to wade further still. As I say below, there seem to be several words here that have a connection with France. Not sure if this was deliberate. Read the rest of this entry »