Azed

The standard, routine, par for the course, vanilla wordplays waiting for reader enlightenment. Across 1 BARON,G – it’s broad-bladed knife 6 M,AVENS – indeed AVENS is a rosaceous plant 12 ETOURD*,ERIE – stupid … Read more >>

What you always get from Azed: apparently tortuous clues, but everything’s do-able so long as you persevere with all the wading through Chambers, because all the clueing is completely sound. Across 1 WIT-CRACKER … Read more >>

Azed 1991 – Ars Magna Clues led to two words which were anagrams of each other – the definition provided one, and the wordplay the other. In the lists below, the definition word … Read more >>

A pretty easy Azed this week: with some judicious guessing of unfamiliar words (which one gets quite good at after solving these puzzles for several decades) I managed to finish this in less … Read more >>

Nick:  A perhaps more difficult AZED this week, due to the strange grid having two words per quarter connecting each ‘mini-grid’;  for me, this made it like four very small crosswords, with the … Read more >>

I found this puzzle considerably harder than usual, partly as a result of my failure early on to solve any of the four long clues which form the border to the puzzle. I … Read more >>

While many of you were watching England’s unfortunate demise in South Africa last Sunday, I was sitting on the top deck of an almost deserted Lord’s pavilion, watching a T20 match between the … Read more >>

Sorry for the late blog… no excuses (OK other than 48 World Cup games + Wimbledon). I thought this slightly harder than the run-of-the-mill Azed (oxymoron?). No lack of the requisite mysteries. Across … Read more >>

The usual pleasurable experience. All the clues are utterly sound and you know you’ll get there in the end, even if the progress is a bit slow. The words are — in this … Read more >>

This puzzle reminded me (after completion) of a famous clue from N C Dexter, back in January 1984 (Azed 610), when the word to be clued was DOUBLETHINK. The winning clue was: By … Read more >>

A relatively easy Azed this week – I managed to solve most of it without aids, with only the SW corner causing some difficulties. I can’t fully explain 18ac, and there seems to … Read more >>

Nick:  Typically nice AZED this week which I feel was a tad more difficult than some weeks.  I had to use Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to confirm 28dn and fully understand … Read more >>

A fairly straightforward puzzle this week, which took me a little over two hours to solve, although there were the usual number of obscure and unfamiliar words. No major quibbles, except for one … Read more >>

I usually enjoy a jigsaw, because I like the way that progress accelerates once you crack a critical step. In this case, that step was the realisation that, of the two 11-letter solutions, … Read more >>

I completely forgot about this blog. Gaufrid kindly reminded me yesterday so I promptly forgot again. And then woke up this morning with something niggling my memory. That was about an hour and … Read more >>