I did most of this on the tube, without Chambers, which is an interesting exercise – you have to make quite a few educated guesses and then corroborate them via the dictionary later (I came unstuck doing this in the competition puzzle a few weeks ago when I forgot to check one guess, which was in fact a word of my own invention!) Fifteen words that were new to me – more across than down – which is why doing Azed’s so good for your vocabulary. His clueing is beautifully concise, and a lot of the wordplay’s actually very straightforward once you work out how to split the clue.
ACROSS:
1. PLASTRON. LAST in PRON(e). Never worn one myself – apparently it’s a shirt front.
8. SAM. Surface-to-air missile/ Spenserian word for together.
11. YAUTIA. Compound anagram of ‘Paraguayan tuber I” without “a burger pan”. This is my least favourite type of Azed clue – often you eliminate all the other letters to be left with an obvious anagram, though not in this case (except for Paraguayan greengrocers perhaps).
12. BIOTA. B=breadth, + iota.
13. ANTABUSE. TABU in ANS + (sentenc)E. Isn’t antabuse when you pull their legs off?
14. PARTICIPATES. SEAT* after ARTIC in PIP. As in give someone the pip, old-fashioned slang for offence. Nice to get ‘artic’ in there.
17. TORANA. To + RANA.
18. PIOTED. IT + DOPE*. Means piebald, as does pinto.
19. EPICAL. PICA in (b)EL(t).
20. OUTRAN. OU (Oxford Univ, dark blues in boat race) + TRA(i)N – dropping fourth letter.
23. ISCHIA. Ref. island in the Bay of Naples – literally isolated.
25. TRIOSE. IE SORT anag. You can get away with short, obvious anagrams when the word is likely to be unfamiliar.
27. LEVOROTATORY. LOT OVER* + A TORY. Great word, deceptively simple clue – to the left of just refers to position within the word.
28. SCARIOUS. S(quad) + CARIOUS.
30. SITED. I in STED. “I’ll be” is used so that I can be the personal pronoun or just the letter – “I am fixed in place” would not be allowed by Azed.
31. CROUTE. C + ROUTE. Very straightforward wordplay.
32. SAE. Stamped addressed envelope/ Scots for ‘so’.
33. INTENDED. TEN in IDDEN*. I’m not keen on ‘veiled’ as an anagram indicator. In the sense of ‘disguised, obscured, but it doesn’t suggest mixing the letters to me.
DOWN
1. PYA. PYA*. Simple anag, obscure unit of currency.
2. LANAI. Hidden < in “HawaiIAN ALteration”. This word popped up in another puzzole recently, so came quite easily.
3. STATE TROOPER. TREAT* in STOOPER.
4. TIBIAE. I BIT < + A(varic)E. I put ETAIAE before thinking better of it.
5. RAUCID. CU < in RAID. Another good word. “(At dawn?)” seems unnecessary.
6. ONSITE. TENSIO(n)*.
7. DIVARICATION. DIVA + RITA ICON*.
8. SOUTACHE. S (‘is’ shortened) + OUT + ACHE. Barred setters will also use s for is without indicating shortening.
9. ATHENA. A THEN A. Very nice clue.
10. MARSALAS. MARS + ALAS.
15. SPOTLESS. PLOT* in SESS. Sess is an obsolete word for a local tax – obsolence is sometimes indicated by ‘old’ etc, but not consistently.
16. MOTIVATE. MOT + VAT in IE.
21. UREDIA. RED I in (q)UA(t). Quat being a dialect word for pimple – but since a pustule is a pimple too, how do you get one on the other?
22. NEOCON. ONCE* + ON. The one that’s not in Chambers, but familiar enough.
23. INTACT. IN T(he) ACT. Nice treatment, but doesn’t ‘wherein’ demand the reply ‘the act’ rather than ‘in the act’ – I’d have thought ‘where’ would work better.
24. SPARRE. (bee)R in SPARE.
26. BRUTE. TUBER*.
29. SED. (o)DES <. Milton this time.
Rats! That’s twice in recent weeks I’ve been stumped by one clue in Azed (the other one was FLOC in 1799). In this case it was 18ac – I guessed POOTED. Don’t know why, it didn’t make sense. Looking again now I see that pinto and pioted are on the same page in Chambers (although you get redirected to ‘pyot’). D’oh!
without saying what it is, do you agree that there may be a spelling mistake in the latest puzzle? or am i missing something?
Agreed – it’s possible to put in the correct spelling but not to construct it from the clue. As it happens, this word falls within my wife’s area of expertise!
thank you for this, I have been tearing my hair out over it. Sorry to those who run this excellent page for being sneaky!
slightly off-topic: amusingly if you click on the link for the PDF version of the latest online Azed (1804): namely, http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Observer/documents/2006/12/22/1804_dec24.pdf
you’ll note the following:
AZED No. 1,801 Prizewinners
1 Namey Namey, Address Address
2 Namey Namey, Address Address
3 Namey Namey, Address Address
a distinguished family, the Nameys- three generations of clue-setters, by the look of it.