mistercrayon wrote:

MattyJ wrote:

I don't get cryptic crosswords... Is it something you guys have learned or just are good at figuring them out?

For me I just wanted to get into them so I bought a cheat book after having a go at one. A cryptic crossword clue is really two clues in one. The majority of the time one of these will be a definition (like a normal crossword) and the other will be a way to construct the word. Like this: Confused star is vermin (4) Somewhere in there you put a comma and one side is entirely about a definition and the other is a way of putting letters together. The combination will help you get the clue. In this case the comma exists before the word "is vermin". (In this case the word is is used to make the clue read a little less clunky and doesn't really add anything) So the first part is Confused star Here we have a clue word (confused) which tells us some letters nearby are scrambled (the clue word could have been anything to suggest an anagram). So here it would be an anagram of star. Which could be arts, Tars or rats or something. The second half "vermin" gives us the definition, so could be mice, rats or cockroaches or something. Anyway from here we can work that the answer is "rats"