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In the following sentences, identify the pronouns and nouns that do not agree and explain your reasoning. Rewrite each sentence to make the pronouns agree with the nouns they refer to.First-person pronounsA word that takes the place of the writer or narrator. Examples: I, we, me, us, my, mine, our, and ours. refer to the writer. They include I, me, my, mine, our, ours, us, and we. These are used in a number of situations, including responses, emails, cover lettersA letter that is sent along with a resume that provides context and more information for the reader., memosA short written message from one person to another or to a group of persons, usually containing business information., and some reports, like a witness report in a criminal case. However, in some situations, first-person pronouns are not appropriate. Academic writing often omits first-person pronouns even when the writer is discussing a personal opinion. Avoiding first-person pronouns in an essay ensures that the reader focuses on the topic and not the authorA person who wrote a text.. Third-person pronounsA word that takes the place of persons, places, or things that are not the writer or the intended audience. Examples: he, she, it, they, him, her, them, his, her, hers, its, their, and theirs. are used more often than first- and second-person pronouns because they refer to persons, places, or things that are not the reader or the writer. They include he, him, his, she, her, hers, it, its, they, them, their, and theirs. They almost always come after the noun they refer to has been introduced and they should always agree with that noun in both number (singular or plural) and gender. This is called pronoun-antecedent agreementCorrect grammatical form where pronouns agree with the noun they refer to in both number (singular or plural) and gender. and is similar to subject-verb agreementA grammatical term that describes when a writer uses subjects and verbs that match each other in both number (singular or plural) and person (first, second, or third). Example: The girls have pretty dresses and bows that match. In this sentence the subject, girls, is plural, so the verb have, and the nouns dresses and bows must also be plural., although sometimes it can be more difficult to identify because errors in pronoun agreement are quite common in everyday speech. In this sentence, the noun every citizen is singular, while the pronoun themselves is plural. One way to correct this is to change the pronoun to be plural to match the noun.In both cases, the information about texting while driving is clear. However, the second-person point of view is weaker than the third-person point of view, which sounds like a fact instead of advice.

Second-person pronounsA word that takes the place of the intended audience. Examples: you, your, yours. always refer to the reader, the intended audience. They include you, your, and yours. A writer should use second-person pronouns when speaking directly to the reader. For example, it is appropriate to use these pronouns in instructions, an email to a specific person or group, text messages, and presentations. Second-person pronouns are rarely used in academic writing. Using the second-person point of view in research and thesis papers can make them less effective, making them seem more like advice instead of information or persuasion.This is a common error and comes from the fact the noun student is singular but not gender specific (meaning that it can refer to either a male or female student), but the appropriate pronouns are gender specific (he or she). Many writers address this issue by using the term s/he as the pronoun, but people often find that phrase awkward. Another way to solve this issue is to make the noun plural, which allows for the use of they, which is a pronoun that is not gender specific.

In this sentence, the noun people is plural, while the pronoun his is singular. One way to correct this is to change the pronoun to be plural to match the noun.In both cases, it is clear that the author did not like the movie. However, in the first statement, the focus is on the author. In the second statement, the focus is on the quality of the movie. In most college classes, it is best to avoid using first-person pronouns unless you are writing a personal narrative essay.In this sentence, the noun driver is singular, while the pronoun their is plural. One way to correct this is to change the noun to be plural to match the pronoun.Did we help with your crossword? Hope so! Now try our printable crosswords or our online crossword puzzles. Seven new crosswords available daily, free.The jumble puzzle often has a small crossword element as its first step. By solving the crossword clues, you are given a set of letters that you then unscramble for the final solution. In this variation, a large part of the puzzle is taken up by a long, secret phrase. By solving the regular clues, you will eventually have enough vowels and consonants to solve the longer riddle. 3. When you press Search, you will receive a list of possible answers based on your information. The program accesses a database of the most common crossword puzzle answers that fit your description.Crossword puzzles are designed for many different publications. A book of crossword puzzles designed for extended use will use evergreen clues that will be relevant for many years. A weekly newspaper crossword or daily puzzle may have references to current events or popular figures. Clues such as these have a limited shelf life, but they make the puzzles more interesting. Starting with the simplest clues will help you fill your grid. Fill-in-the-blank clues are often the easiest because they use common names and phrases. As you do more puzzles, you will also see that designers reuse clues for common connecting words like EAR, ALE and ERE. If you have a clue that you simply cannot solve on your own, Crossword Solver is a helpful tool. All you need to do is input the clue and whatever information you have. The search results will give you the most likely answer for your puzzle.

Because the crossword puzzle has been around for so long, several variations on the standard format have appeared. The different types of puzzles vary in difficulty and style.Clues in a basic crossword puzzle follow rules to help you solve them. For example, the tense of the clue is a hint about the tense of the answer. The answer to a clue like “Used to hurry” will be RAN and not RUN. In more advanced puzzles, you will need to think outside the box as the puzzle designer may use wordplay to increase the challenge.

For example, if your clue is “Nonsense,” and you know it is a 10-letter word that starts with T, there is a 95% chance that it is either triviality or tomfoolery.This English variation on the standard crossword is far more difficult than a standard crossword. The clues of a cryptic puzzle are more challenging and unclear. For example, this type of puzzle is more likely to use anagrams or other creative wordplays.

For over a century, crossword puzzles have been a favorite pastime for those who love words. While many people enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that comes with solving a difficult clue, others walk away from the puzzle in frustration.

An anagram is a rearrangement of a certain section of the clue to form the answer. This is usually indicated by words such as “strange”, “bizarre”, “muddled”, “wild”, “drunk”, or any other term indicating change. One example:

Cryptic crosswords often appear in British literature, and are particularly popular in murder mysteries, where they are part of the puzzle. The character Inspector Morse created by Colin Dexter is fond of solving cryptic crosswords, and the crosswords often become part of the mystery. Colin Dexter himself set crosswords for The Oxford Times for many years and was a national crossword champion. In the short story “The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will”, by Dorothy L Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey solves a crossword in order to solve the mystery, while the solution to Agatha Christie’s Curtain hinges on an Othello themed crossword. Ruth Rendell has used the device in her novel One Across, Two Down. Among non-crime writers, crosswords often feature in the works of P. G. Wodehouse, and are an important part of the short story “The Truth About George”. Alan Plater’s 1994 novel Oliver’s Travels (turned into a BBC television serial of the same name in 1995) centres round crossword solving and the hunt for a missing compiler.Anagram clues are characterized by an indicator word adjacent to a phrase that has the same number of letters as the answer. The indicator tells the solver that there is an anagram they need to solve to work out the answer. Indicators come either before or after the letters to be anagrammed. In an American cryptic, only the words given in the clue may be anagrammed; in some older puzzles, the words to be anagrammed may be clued and then anagrammed. So in this clue:

Another type of abbreviation in clues might be words that refer to letters. For example, ‘you’ refers to the letter U, ‘why’ refers to the letter Y, etc. A clue for instance:The answer is BANKING formed by BAN for “outlaw” and KING for “leader”. The definition is “managing money”. With this example, the words appear in the same order in the clue as they do in the answer, and no special words are needed to indicate this. However, the order of the parts is sometimes indicated with words such as “against”, “after”, “on”, “with” or “above” (in a down clue).

A cryptic crossword is a crossword puzzle in which each clue is a word puzzle. Cryptic crosswords are particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where they originated, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, and in several Commonwealth nations, including Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malta, New Zealand, and South Africa. Compilers of cryptic crosswords are commonly called “setters” in the UK and “constructors” in the US. Particularly in the UK, a distinction may be made between cryptics and “quick” (i.e. standard) crosswords, and sometimes two sets of clues are given for a single puzzle grid.The answer is RAVEN, which means “bird” and is craven, or “cowardly”, without the first letter (in this case c, the abbreviation for circa or “about”).

Torquemada’s successor at The Observer was Ximenes (Derrick Somerset Macnutt), and in his influential work, Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword Puzzle (1966), he set out more detailed guidelines for setting fair cryptic clues, now known as “Ximenean principles” and sometimes described by the phrase “square-dealing”. The most important of them are tersely summed up by Ximenes’ successor Azed (Jonathan Crowther):

As an example, a puzzle entitled “Trash Talk” by Bob Stigger in the June 2019 issue of the U.S. publication Games World of Puzzles included the following instruction:Daily Telegraph Tuesday 22 April 2014 has: “Dog in wild? Yes! (5)”; the answer is DINGO. “Dog in wild” means “rearrange the letters of “DOG IN”, and is the definition.A typical cryptic crossword grid is generally 15×15, with half-turn rotational symmetry. Unlike typical American crosswords, in which every square is almost always checked (that is, each square provides a letter for both an across and a down answer), only about half of the squares in a cryptic crossword are checked.

Of these examples, “flower” is an invented meaning (using the verb flow and the suffix -er), and cannot be confirmed in a standard dictionary. A similar trick is played in the old clue “A wicked thing” for CANDLE, where the -ed suffix must be understood in its “equipped with a …” meaning. In the case of the -er suffix, this trick could be played with other meanings of the suffix, but except for river → BANKER (a river is not a ‘thing that banks’ but a ‘thing that has banks’), this is rarely done.Because a typical cryptic clue describes its answer in detail and often more than once, the solver can usually have a great deal of confidence in the answer once it has been determined. The clues are “self-checking.” This is in contrast to non-cryptic crossword clues which often have several possible answers and force the solver to use the crossing letters to distinguish which was intended. A cryptic clue leads to its answer only if it is read in the right way. What the clue appears to say when read normally (the surface reading) is a distraction and usually has nothing to do with the clue answer. The challenge is to find the way of reading the clue that leads to the solution. A typical clue consists of two parts: Most of the major national newspapers in the UK carry both cryptic and concise (quick) crosswords in every issue. The puzzle in The Guardian is well loved for its humour and quirkiness, and quite often includes puzzles with themes, which are extremely rare in The Times.Crosswords feature prominently in the 1945 British romantic drama film Brief Encounter, scripted by playwright Noël Coward, which is number two in the British Film Institute’s Top 100 British films. The plot of “The Riddle of the Sphinx”, a 2017 episode of Inside No. 9, revolves around the clues and answers to a particular crossword puzzle, which had appeared on the day of the original broadcast in The Guardian.There are notable differences between British and North American (including Canadian) cryptics. American cryptics are thought of as holding to a more rigid set of construction rules than British ones. American cryptics usually require all words in a clue to be used in service of the wordplay or definition, whereas British ones allow for more extraneous or supporting words. In American cryptics, a clue is only allowed to have one subsidiary indication, but in British cryptics the occasional clue may have more than one; e.g., a triple definition clue would be considered an amusing variation in the UK but unsound in the US.

Cryptic crosswords do not commonly appear in U.S. publications, although they can be found in magazines such as GAMES Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and occasionally in the Sunday New York Times. The New York Post reprints cryptic crosswords from The Times. In April 2018, The New Yorker published the first of a new weekly series of cryptic puzzles. Other sources of cryptic crosswords in the U.S. (at various difficulty levels) are puzzle books, as well as UK and Canadian newspapers distributed in the U.S. Other venues include the Enigma, the magazine of the National Puzzlers’ League, and formerly, The Atlantic Monthly. The latter puzzle, after a long and distinguished run, appeared solely on The Atlantic’s website for several years, and ended with the October 2009 issue. A similar puzzle by the same authors now appears every four weeks in The Wall Street Journal, beginning in January 2010. Cryptic crosswords have become more popular in the United States in the years following the COVID-19 lockdowns with several “indie” outlets and setters.This type of clue is common in British and Canadian cryptics but is generally unused in American cryptics; in American-style crosswords, a clue like this is generally called a punny clue. It’s almost certainly the oldest kind of cryptic clue: cryptic definitions appeared in the UK newspaper puzzles in the late 1920s and early 1930s that mixed cryptic and plain definition clues and evolved into fully cryptic crosswords.

Some papers have additional grid rules. In The Times, for example, all words have at least half the letters checked, and although words can have two unchecked squares in succession, they cannot be the first two or last two letters of a word. The grid shown here breaks one Times grid rule: the 15-letter words at 9 and 24 across each have 8 letters unchecked out of 15. The Independent allows setters to use their own grid designs.

Research into cryptic crossword solving has been comparatively sparse. Several discrete areas have been explored: the cognitive or linguistic challenges posed by cryptic clues; the mechanisms by which the “Aha!” moment is triggered by solving cryptic crossword clues; the use of cryptic crosswords to preserve cognitive flexibility (“use-it-or-lose-it”) in aging populations; and expertise studies into the drivers of high performance and ability in solving cryptics.Recent expertise studies by Friedlander and Fine, based on a large-scale survey of 805 solvers of all ability (mainly UK-based), suggest that cryptic crossword solvers are generally highly academically able adults whose education and occupations lie predominantly in the area of scientific, mathematical or IT-related fields. This STEM connection increases significantly with level of expertise, particularly for mathematics and IT. The authors suggest that cryptic crossword skill is bound up with code-cracking and problem-solving skills of a logical and quasi-algebraic nature.

Torquemada’s puzzles were extremely obscure and difficult, and later setters reacted against this tendency by developing a standard for fair clues, ones that can be solved, at least in principle, by deduction, without needing leaps of faith or insights into the setter’s thought processes.There are many sorts of wordplay, such as anagrams and double definitions, but they all conform to rules. The crossword setters do their best to stick to these rules when writing their clues, and solvers can use these rules and conventions to help them solve the clues. Noted cryptic setter Derrick Somerset Macnutt (who wrote cryptics under the pseudonym of Ximenes) discusses the importance and art of fair cluemanship in his seminal book on cryptic crosswords, Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966, reprinted 2001).

The Guardian is perhaps the most Libertarian of cryptic crosswords, while The Times is mostly Ximenean. The others tend to be somewhere in between; the Financial Times and Independent tend towards Ximenean, the Daily Telegraph also – although its Toughie crossword can take a very Libertarian approach depending on the setter. None of the major daily cryptics in the UK is “strictly Ximenean”; all allow clues which are just cryptic definitions, and strict Ximenean rules exclude such clues. There are other differences like nounal anagram indicators and in current Times crosswords, unindicated definition by example: “bay” in the clue indicating HORSE in the answer, without a qualification like “bay, perhaps”.In Britain it is traditional — dating from the cryptic crossword pioneer Edward (Bill) Powys Mathers (1892–1939), who called himself “Torquemada” after the Spanish Inquisitor — for compilers to use evocative pseudonyms. “Crispa”, named from the Latin for “curly-headed”, who set crosswords for the Guardian from 1954 until her retirement in 2004, legally changed her surname to “Crisp” after divorcing in the 1970s. Some pseudonyms have obvious connotations: for example, Torquemada as already described, or “Mephisto” with fairly obvious devilish overtones. Others are chosen for logical but less obvious reasons, though “Dinmutz” (the late Bert Danher in the Financial Times) was produced by random selection of Scrabble tiles. If the two words are the same length, the clue should be phrased in such a way that only one of them can be the answer. This is usually done by having the homophone indicator adjacent to the word that is not the definition; therefore, in the previous example, “we hear” was adjacent to “twins” and the answer was pare rather than pair. The indicator could come between the words if they were of different lengths and the enumeration was given, such as in the case of “right” and “rite”. Deletion is a wordplay mechanism which removes some letters of a word to create a shorter word. Deletions consist of beheadments, curtailments, and internal deletions. In beheadments, a word loses its first letter. In curtailments, it loses its last letter, and internal deletions remove an inner letter, such as the middle one.gives THAMES, a flow-er of London. Here, the surface reading suggests a blossom, which disguises the fact that the name of a river is required. Notice the question mark: this is often (though by no means always) used by compilers to indicate this sort of clue is one where you need to interpret the words in a different fashion. The way that a clue reads as an ordinary sentence is called its surface reading and is often used to disguise the need for a different interpretation of the clue’s component words.

The answer would be ANNIE, the name of a famous orphan in musical theatre. This is obtained from the first letters of “actor needing new identity emulates”.Both the solution word or phrase and its corresponding Spoonerism are clued for, and the clue type is almost always indicated by reference to William Archibald Spooner himself – with some regions/publications insisting his religious title “Rev.” or “Reverend” be included. In contrast to all other clue types, this makes them almost impossible to disguise. But that doesn’t necessarily make them easy.

This takes advantage of the two very different meanings (and pronunciations) of POLISH, the one with the long “o” sound meaning “someone from Poland” and the one with the short “o” sound meaning “make shiny”.

We must expect the composer to play tricks, but we shall insist that he play fair. The Book of the Crossword lays this injunction upon him: “You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean.” This is a superior way of saying that he can’t have it both ways. He may attempt to mislead by employing a form of words which can be taken in more than one way, and it is your fault if you take it the wrong way, but it is his fault if you can’t logically take it the right way.

Compilers or setters often use slang terms and abbreviations, generally without indication, so familiarity with these is important for the solver. Abbreviations may be as simple as ‘west’ = W, ‘New York’ = NY, but may also be more difficult. Words that can mean more than one thing are commonly exploited; often the meaning the solver must use is completely different from the one it appears to have in the clue. Some examples are:would have the answer BLIND, because blind can mean both “not seeing” and “window covering”. Note that since these definitions come from the same root word, an American magazine might not allow this clue. American double definitions tend to require both parts to come from different roots, as in this clue:

Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings, such as “night” and “knight”. Homophone clues always have an indicator word or phrase that has to do with being spoken or heard. Examples of homophone indicators include “reportedly”, “they say”, “utterly” (here treated as “utter(ing)-ly” and not with its usual meaning), “vocal”, “to the audience”, “auditioned”, “by the sound of it”, “is heard”, “in conversation” and “on the radio”. “Broadcast” is a particularly devious indicator as it could indicate either a homophone or an anagram.In the Daily Telegraph back page, Monday 15 March 2017, 7 down, is “Banish spirits with zero ice upsetting imbibing times (8)”; the answer is EXORCIZE: it means “banish spirits”, and is “zero ice” rearranged, including ‘x’ (described as “times”). The word “upsetting” indicates an anagram and the word “imbibing” indicates an insertion.Friedlander and Fine also note that solvers are motivated predominantly by “Aha!” moments, and intrinsic rewards such as mental challenge. Solvers voluntarily choose to engage with intellectually and culturally stimulating activities like music, theatre, reading, and the arts in their leisure time, and pursue active musical participation such as singing or playing an instrument at noticeably higher levels than the UK national average. Solving cryptic crossword clues can lead to a succession of ‘Aha!’ or ‘Penny-Dropping’ Moments which is highly rewarding; Friedlander and Fine suggest that research could take advantage of the range of cryptic crossword devices to explore the mechanics of insight in more depth. Looking at expert cryptic crossword solvers – who speedily overcome the clue misdirection – and comparing them with typical, everyday solvers of equal experience may provide a better understanding of the kind of person who can overcome a solving ‘hitch’ more easily, and how they go about it.

gives UNDERMINED, which means (cryptically at least) “damaged” and can be found as part of “Found ermine deer”. The word “hides” is used to mean “contains,” but in the surface sense suggests “pelts”. A complication is that “damaged” often (but not in this clue) means “rearrange the letters”. The answer would be SUFFRAGIST, which is “someone wanting women to vote”. The word “odd” indicates that we must take every other letter of the rest of the clue, starting with the first: StUfF oF mR wAuGh Is SeT. The first newspaper crosswords appeared in the Sunday and Daily Express from about 1924. Crosswords were gradually taken up by other newspapers, appearing in the Daily Telegraph from 1925, The Manchester Guardian from 1929 and The Times from 1930. These newspaper puzzles were almost entirely non-cryptic at first and gradually used more cryptic clues, until the fully cryptic puzzle as known today became widespread. In some papers this took until about 1960. Puzzles appeared in The Listener from 1930, but this was a weekly magazine rather than a newspaper, and the puzzles were much harder than the newspaper ones, though again they took a while to become entirely cryptic. Composer Stephen Sondheim, a lover of puzzles, is credited with introducing cryptic crosswords to American audiences, through a series of puzzles he created for New York magazine in 1968 and 1969. In terms of difficulty, Libertarian clues can seem impenetrable to inexperienced solvers. However, more significant is the setter him/herself. Crosswords in the Times and Daily Telegraph are published anonymously, so the crossword editor ensures that clues adhere to a consistent house style. Inevitably each setter has an individual (and often very recognisable) approach to clue-writing, but the way in which wordplay devices are used and indicated is kept within a defined set of rules. gives PAUL (“apostle”), by placing “pal” (“friend”) outside of “U” (“university”); the “‘s” could be treated as the genitive case suffix or as short for “is”.The answer is ODIN. The Norse god Odin is hidden in “god incarnate”, as clued by “essentially”, but the definition of Odin is also the whole clue, as Odin is essentially a God incarnate.

The letter bank form of cluing consists of a shorter word (or words) containing no repeated letters (an “isogram”), and a longer word or phrase built by using each of these letters (but no others) at least once but repeating them as often as necessary. This type of clue has been described by American constructors Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto, who write the weekly puzzle for The Nation. The shorter word is typically at least three or four letters in length, while the target word or phrase is at least three letters longer than the bank word. For example, the four letters in the word TENS can be used as a bank to form the word TENNESSEE. Typically, the clue contains indicator words such as “use,” “take,” or “implement” to signal that a letter bank is being employed.It is common for the setter to use a juxtaposition of anagram indicator and anagram that form a common phrase to make the clue appear as much like a ‘normal’ sentence or phrase as possible. For example:

A July 2006 “Puzzlecraft” section in Games magazine on cryptic crossword construction noted that for cryptic crosswords to be readily solvable, no fewer than half the letters for every word should be checked by another word for a standard cryptic crossword, while nearly every letter should be checked for a variety cryptic crossword. In most UK “advanced cryptics” (‘variety cryptic’), at least three-quarters of the letters in each word are checked.Cryptic clue styles across newspapers are ostensibly similar, but there are technical differences which result in the work of setters being regarded as either Ximenean or Libertarian (and often a combination of both).

An “&lit.” or “Literal” clue is not a clue type, but, rather a variant on an existing clue. “&lit” stands for “and literally so”. The name comes from Derrick Somerset Macnutt (known by his pen name Ximenes): he defined it as meaning “‘This clue both indicates the letters or parts of the required word, in one of the ways already explained in this book, and can also be read, in toto, literally, as an indication of the meaning of the whole word, whether as a straight or as a veiled definition’.” That is to say, the entire clue is both a definition and a cryptic clue. In some publications, particularly in the United States, &lit clues are indicated by an exclamation mark at the end of the clue. For example:Chew is the anagram indicator; honeydew clues melon, which is to be anagrammed; and fruit is the definition for the answer, LEMON. This kind of clue is called an indirect anagram, which in the vast majority of cryptic crosswords are not used, ever since they were criticised by ‘Ximenes’ in his 1966 book On the Art of the Crossword. Minor exception: simple abbreviations may be used to spice up the process; e.g., “Husband, a most eccentric fellow” (6) for THOMAS, where the anagram is made from A, MOST, and H = husband.

In India the Telugu publication Sakshi carries a “Tenglish” (Telugu-English, bilingual) cryptic crossword; the Prajavani and Vijaya Karnataka crossword (Kannada) also employs cryptic wordplay. Enthusiasts have also created cryptic crosswords in Hindi. Since 1994, enigmista Ennio Peres has challenged Italians annually with Il cruciverba più difficile del mondo (The World’s Most Difficult Crossword), which has many features in common with English-style cryptics.is a quintuple definition of DOWN (“blue” (sad), “swallow” (drink), “feathers” (plumage), “fell” (cut down) and “from above”), but in the US this would be considered unsound.

gives the answer EGG. Geese find their origins in eggs, so the whole clue gives “egg”, but the clue can also be broken down: e.g., loses its full stops to give eg, followed by the first letter (i.e., the “origin”) of the word goose—g—to make egg.”Themed” or “variety” cryptics have developed a small but enthusiastic following in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. Variety cryptics are arguably among the most difficult of all crossword puzzles, both to compile and to solve, since they often involve alterations to the answers before entry into the grid, meaning that there is no assurance that the cross clues will match up unless properly altered.Cryptic crosswords are very popular in Australia. Most Australian newspapers will have at least one cryptic crossword, if not two. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne publish daily cryptic crosswords, including Friday’s challenging cryptic by ‘DA’ (David Astle). “Lovatts”, an Australian puzzle publisher, regularly issues cryptic crossword puzzle books.

would give the answer VETO; in the cryptic sense, spoil works as an anagram indicator for vote, while the whole clue is, with a certain amount of licence allowed to crossword setters, a definition.The answer would be DAHOMEY, which used to be a kingdom in Africa (an “old country”). Here, we take the first letters of only the words “Head Office” (ho) and we take the “end” of the word “day” (y). The letters of the word “dame”, meaning “lady”, are then made to go around the letters “ho” to form Dahomey. Ximenean rules are very precise in terms of grammar and syntax, especially as regards the indicators used for various methods of wordplay. Libertarian setters may use devices which “more or less” get the message across. For example, when treating the answer BEER the setter may decide to split the word into BEE and R and, after finding suitable ways to define the answer and BEE, now looks to give the solver a clue to the letter R. Ximenean rules would not allow something like “reach first” to indicate that R is the first letter of “reach” because, grammatically, that is not what “reach first” implies. Instead, a phrase along the lines of “first to reach” would be needed as this conforms to rules of grammar. Many Libertarian crossword editors would, however, accept “reach first” as it would be considered to reasonably get the idea across. For instance, a clue following Ximenean rules for BEER (BEE + R) may look as such: Cryptic crosswords originated in the UK. The first British crossword puzzles appeared around 1923 and were purely definitional, but from the mid-1920s they began to include cryptic material: not cryptic clues in the modern sense, but anagrams, classical allusions, incomplete quotations, and other references and wordplay. Torquemada (Edward Powys Mathers), who set for The Saturday Westminster from 1925 and for The Observer from 1926 until his death in 1939, was the first setter to use cryptic clues exclusively and is often credited as the inventor of the cryptic crossword.

Anagram indicators, among the thousands possible, include: about, abstract, absurd, adapted, adjusted, again, alien, alternative, anew, another, around, arranged, assembled, assorted, at sea, awful, awkward, bad, barmy, becomes, blend, blow, break, brew, build, careless, changed, chaotic, characters, clumsy, composed, confused, contrived, convert, cooked, corrupt, could be, crazy, damaged, dancing, designed, develop, different, disorderly, disturbed, doctor, eccentric, edited, engineer, fabricate, fake, fancy, faulty, fiddled, fix, foolish, form, free, fudge, gives, ground, hammer, haywire, hybrid, improper, in a tizzy, involved, irregular, jostle, jumbled, jumping, kind of, knead, letters, loose, made, managed, maybe, messy, mistaken, mix, modified, moving, muddled, mutant, new, novel, odd, off, order, organised, otherwise, out, outrageous, peculiar, perhaps, playing, poor, possible, prepared, produced, queer, questionable, random, reform, remodel, repair, resort, rough, shaken, shifting, silly, sloppy, smashed, somehow, sort, spoilt, strange, style, switch, tangled, treated, tricky, troubled, turning, twist, unconventional, undone, unsettled, unsound, untidy, unusual, upset, used, vary, version, warped, wayward, weird, wild, working, wrecked, wrong.Clues given to the solver are based on various forms of wordplay. Nearly every clue has two non-overlapping parts to it: one part that provides an unmodified but often indirect definition for the word or phrase, and a second part that includes the wordplay involved. In a few cases, the two definitions are one and the same, as often in the case of “&lit.” clues. Most cryptic crosswords provide the number of letters in the answer, or in the case of phrases, a series of numbers to denote the letters in each word: “cryptic crossword” would be clued with “(7,9)” following the clue. More advanced puzzles may drop this portion of the clue.

There are many “code words” or “indicators” that have a special meaning in the cryptic crossword context. (In the example above, “about”, “unfinished” and “rising” all fall into this category). Learning these, or being able to spot them, is a useful and necessary part of becoming a skilled cryptic crossword solver.Cryptic crossword puzzles come in two main types: the basic cryptic in which each clue answer is entered into the diagram normally, and “themed” or “variety” cryptics, in which some or all of the answers must be altered before entering, usually in accordance with a hidden pattern or rule which must be discovered by the solver. Variety (UK: “advanced”) cryptic crosswords typically use a “barred grid” with no black squares and a slightly smaller size; 12×12 is typical. Word boundaries are denoted by thick lines called “bars”. In these variety puzzles, one or more clues may require modification to fit into the grid, such as dropping or adding a letter, or being anagrammed to fit other, unmodified clues; unclued spaces may spell out a secret message appropriate for the puzzle theme once the puzzle is fully solved. The solver also may need to determine where answers fit into the grid. gives DOG, which is the first part of, or “introduction to”, the word “do-gooder”, and means “canine”. Hidden words clues are sometimes called “Embedded words” or “Telescopic clues”. The opposite of a hidden word clue, where letters missing from a sentence have to be found, is known as a Printer’s Devilry, and appears in some advanced cryptics.

Generally, most authors avoid writing a fiction story—or any other story—in the second person because it is difficult to do effectively and/or suggests that a reader is a character in the story. However, the second person is used in media such as self-help books, video games, interactive fiction, virtual reality, and roleplay that includes the reader/listener/player as part of the story. For example, a person leading a role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons might start a story with a sentence like You traverse the cursed woods and come to a haunted castle because the other players (and their characters) are part of the story being told. What is something that you like to do as a hobby? Are your friends’ hobbies the same as yours? Or do you spend a lot of time by yourself? Alright, that’s enough questions. Sorry to put you on the spot, but it was necessary to give some examples of pronouns that are used to refer to … you. It is your time to shine, because we are going to look at pronouns used in the second person point of view. And we can’t do that without talking about … you!

Second person is a point of view that refers to a person or people being addressed by a writer or speaker. For example, the sentence You walked across a bridge uses the second person to say what “you” (the reader or listener) did. Of the three different points of view, second person is often both the least commonly used and the most difficult to use—more on this later!

We commonly use second-person pronouns when giving another person or people commands, directions, or advice. Usually, we are talking to/texting/calling/emailing a person directly when we do any of these things. The second person also allows us to exclude a subject when using the imperative mood as the subject is understood to be an unstated you.

Although the difference is slight, the second sentence has a call to action that the first sentence lacks. The second sentence uses the second-person pronoun you to connect to the listener/speaker on a personal level in an attempt to be more persuasive.

Second person is one of three points of view. The other two are first person and third person. First-person pronouns refer to the speaker/writer themselves either as an individual or as part of a group. First-person pronouns include I, me, we, us, mine, ours, myself, and ourselves. Third person refers to a person or people other than the speaker/writer or the individual(s) they are addressing. Third-person pronouns include she, he, it, they, her, him, them, hers, his, and theirs.A second-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to a person or people that a speaker or writer is addressing. A second-person pronoun doesn’t refer to the speaker/writer themselves nor does it refer to other people that a speaker/writer is not directly addressing.

Puzzles are often one of several standard sizes. For example, many weekday newspaper puzzles (such as the American New York Times crossword puzzle) are 15×15 squares, while weekend puzzles may be 21×21, 23×23, or 25×25. The New York Times puzzles also set a common pattern for American crosswords by increasing in difficulty throughout the week: their Monday puzzles are the easiest and the puzzles get harder each day until Saturday. Their larger Sunday puzzle is about the same level of difficulty as a weekday-size Thursday puzzle. This has led U.S. solvers to use the day of the week as a shorthand when describing how hard a puzzle is: e.g. an easy puzzle may be referred to as a “Monday” or a “Tuesday”, a medium-difficulty puzzle as a “Wednesday”, and a truly difficult puzzle as a “Saturday”. One of the smallest crosswords in general distribution is a 4×4 crossword compiled daily by John Wilmes, distributed online by USA Today as “QuickCross” and by Universal Uclick as “PlayFour”.Software that aids in creating crossword puzzles has been written since at least 1976; one popular example was Crossword Magic for the Apple II in the 1980s. The earliest software relied on people to input a list of fill words and clues, and automatically maps the answers onto a suitable grid. This is a search problem in computer science because there are many possible arrangements to be checked against the rules of construction. Any given set of answers might have zero, one, or multiple legal arrangements. Modern open source libraries exist that attempt to efficiently generate legal arrangements from a given set of answers. From their origin in New York, crosswords have spread to many countries and languages. In languages other than English, the status of diacritics varies according to the orthography of the particular language, thus: Embedded words are another common trick in cryptics. The clue “Bigotry aside, I’d take him (9)” is solved by APARTHEID. The straight definition is “bigotry”, and the wordplay explains itself, indicated by the word “take” (since one word “takes” another): “aside” means APART and I’d is simply ID, so APART and ID “take” HE (which is, in cryptic crossword usage, a perfectly good synonym for “him”). The answer could be elucidated as APART(HE)ID.When an answer is composed of multiple or hyphenated words, some crosswords (especially in Britain) indicate the structure of the answer. For example, “(3,5)” after a clue indicates that the answer is composed of a three-letter word followed by a five-letter word. Most American-style crosswords do not provide this information.

In Poland, crosswords typically use British-style grids, but some do not have shaded cells. Shaded cells are often replaced by boxes with clues—such crosswords are called Swedish puzzles or Swedish-style crosswords. In a vast majority of Polish crosswords, nouns are the only allowed words.

In Italy, crosswords are usually oblong and larger than French ones, 13×21 being a common size. As in France, they usually are not symmetrical; two-letter words are allowed; and the number of shaded squares is minimized. Nouns (including surnames) and the infinitive or past participle of verbs are allowed, as are abbreviations; in larger crosswords, it is customary to put at the center of the grid phrases made of two to four words, or forenames and surnames. A variant of Italian crosswords does not use shaded squares: words are delimited by thickening the grid. Another variant starts with a blank grid: the solver must insert both the answers and the shaded squares, and across and down clues are either ordered by row and column or not ordered at all.American-style crossword clues, called straight or quick clues by those more familiar with cryptic puzzles, are often simple definitions of the answers. Often, a straight clue is not in itself sufficient to distinguish between several possible answers, either because multiple synonymous answers may fit or because the clue itself is a homonym (e.g., “Lead” as in to be ahead in a contest or “Lead” as in the element), so the solver must make use of checks to establish the correct answer with certainty. For example, the answer to the clue “PC key” for a three-letter answer could be ESC, ALT, TAB, DEL, or INS, so until a check is filled in, giving at least one of the letters, the correct answer cannot be determined.

Swedish crosswords are mainly in the illustrated (photos or drawings), in-line clue style typical of the “Swedish-style grid”. The “Swedish-style” grid (picture crosswords) uses no clue numbers. Instead, clues are contained in the cells which do not contain answers, with arrows indicating where and in what direction to fill in answers. Arrows can be omitted from clue cells, in which case the convention is for the answer to go horizontally to the right of the clue cell, or – if the clue cell is split vertically and contains two clues – for the answer to go horizontally to the right for the top clue and vertically below for the bottom clue. This style of grid is also used in several countries other than Sweden, often in magazines, but also in daily newspapers. The grid often has one or more photos replacing a block of squares as a clue to one or several answers; for example, the name of a pop star, or some kind of rhyme or phrase that can be associated with the photo. These puzzles usually have no symmetry in the grid but instead often have a common theme (literature, music, nature, geography, events of a special year, etc.) This tradition prospered already in the mid-1900s, in family magazines and sections of newspapers. Then the specialised magazines took off. Around the turn of the millennium, approximately half a dozen Swedish magazine publishers produced specialised crossword magazines, totaling more than twenty titles, often published on a monthly basis. The oldest extant crossword magazine published in Swedish is Krysset (from Bonnier), founded in 1957. Additionally, nearly all newspapers publish crosswords of some kind, and at weekends often devote specialised sections in the paper to crosswords and similar type of pastime material. Both major evening dailies (Aftonbladet and Expressen) publish a weekly crossword supplement, named Kryss & Quiz and Korsord respectively. Both are available as paid supplements on Mondays and Tuesdays, as part of the ongoing competition between the two newspapers.The crossword puzzle fad received extensive attention, not all of it positive: In 1924, The New York Times complained of the “sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex. This is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport … [solvers] get nothing out of it except a primitive form of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development.” A clergyman called the working of crossword puzzles “the mark of a childish mentality” and said, “There is no use for persons to pretend that working one of the puzzles carries any intellectual value with it.” However, another wrote a complete Bible Cross-Word Puzzle Book. Also in 1925, Time magazine noted that nine Manhattan dailies and fourteen other big newspapers were carrying crosswords, and quoted opposing views as to whether “This crossword craze will positively end by June!” or “The crossword puzzle is here to stay!” In 1925, The New York Times noted, with approval, a scathing critique of crosswords by The New Republic; but concluded that “Fortunately, the question of whether the puzzles are beneficial or harmful is in no urgent need of an answer. The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will be forgotten.” and in 1929 declared, “The cross-word puzzle, it seems, has gone the way of all fads.” In 1930, a correspondent noted that “Together with The Times of London, yours is the only journal of prominence that has never succumbed to the lure of the cross-word puzzle” and said that “The craze—the fad—stage has passed, but there are still people numbering it to the millions who look for their daily cross-word puzzle as regularly as for the weather predictions.”

By the 1920s, the crossword phenomenon was starting to attract notice. In October 1922, newspapers published a comic strip by Clare Briggs entitled “Movie of a Man Doing the Cross-Word Puzzle”, with an enthusiast muttering “87 across ‘Northern Sea Bird’!!??!?!!? Hm-m-m starts with an ‘M’, second letter is ‘U’ … I’ll look up all the words starting with an ‘M-U …’ mus-musi-mur-murd—Hot Dog! Here ’tis! Murre!” In 1923 a humorous squib in The Boston Globe has a wife ordering her husband to run out and “rescue the papers … the part I want is blowing down the street.” “What is it you’re so keen about?” “The Cross-Word Puzzle. Hurry, please, that’s a good boy.” In The New Yorker’s first issue, released in 1925, the “Jottings About Town” section wrote, “Judging from the number of solvers in the subway and ‘L’ trains, the crossword puzzle bids fair to become a fad with New Yorkers.” In 1925, the New York Public Library reported that “The latest craze to strike libraries is the crossword puzzle”, and complained that when “the puzzle ‘fans’ swarm to the dictionaries and encyclopedias so as to drive away readers and students who need these books in their daily work, can there be any doubt of the Library’s duty to protect its legitimate readers?”Capitalization of answer letters is conventionally ignored; crossword puzzles are typically filled in, and their answer sheets published, in all caps. This ensures a proper name can have its initial capital letter checked with a non-capitalizable letter in the intersecting clue.

In 1998 in Jakarta, publisher Elex Media Komputindo (Gramedia Group) published crossword software entitled “Teka-Teki Silang Komputer” (Computerized Crossword Puzzle [Eng]) in diskette form. It is the first Crossword Puzzle software which published in Indonesia. It’s the kind of software of game that can only be played on a PC offline. This software is the created by Sukmono Bayu Adhi. The archive is still stored in the National Library of the Republic of Indonesia (Salemba Library, Jakarta).

The constraints of the American-style grid (in which every letter is checked) often require a fair number of answers not to be dictionary words. As a result, the following ways to clue abbreviations and other non-words, although they can be found in “straight” British crosswords, are much more common in American ones:

An acrostic is a type of word puzzle, in eponymous acrostic form, that typically consists of two parts. The first is a set of lettered clues, each of which has numbered blanks representing the letters of the answer. The second part is a long series of numbered blanks and spaces, representing a quotation or other text, into which the answers for the clues fit. In most forms of the puzzle, the first letters of each correct clue answer, read in order from clue A on down the list, will spell out the author of the quote and the title of the work it is taken from; this can be used as an additional solving aid.

Another tradition in puzzle design (in North America, India, and Britain particularly) is that the grid should have 180-degree rotational (also known as “radial”) symmetry, so that its pattern appears the same if the paper is turned upside down. Most puzzle designs also require that all white cells be orthogonally contiguous (that is, connected in one mass through shared sides, to form a single polyomino). In 1944, Allied security officers were disturbed by the appearance, in a series of crosswords in The Daily Telegraph, of words that were secret code names for military operations planned as part of Operation Overlord. Owing to the large number of words ending with a vowel, Italian crossword-makers have perhaps the most difficult task. The right margin and the bottom can be particularly difficult to put together. From such a perspective, Swedish crossword-makers have a far easier task. Especially in the large picture crosswords, both conjugation of verbs and declension of adjectives and nouns are allowed. A Swedish clue like “kan sättas i munnen” = “sked” (“can be put in the mouth” = “spoon”) can be grammatically changed; “den kan sättas i munnen” = “skeden” (“it can be put in the mouth” = “the spoon”), as the definite form of a noun includes declension.

The first book of crossword puzzles was published by Simon & Schuster in 1924, after a suggestion from co-founder Richard Simon’s aunt. The publisher was initially skeptical that the book would succeed, and only printed a small run at first. The book was promoted with an included pencil, and “This odd-looking book with a pencil attached to it” was an instant hit, leading crossword puzzles to become a craze of 1924. To help promote its books, Simon & Schuster also founded the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America, which began the process of developing standards for puzzle design.