The Guardian recently published its 30,000th cryptic crossword. I feel like crosswords in general have a reputation as an old person thing, and I think more of my fellow millenials should discover the pleasures of the cryptic crossword.
Getting into cryptics requires a bit of a push in the right direction. Just looking at the clues and trying to figure out what’s going on from scratch probably won’t bear much fruit. But once you learn a few basic principles, it’s not as daunting as it seems.
Anatomy of a clue
Here’s an example from my favourite crossword setter, Liam Runnalls:
Does opening Doctor Pepper release all pressure? (4)
— The Saturday Paper, Crossword No. 600
This is a standard cryptic clue, consisting of three elements:
- A definition, always placed at the start or the end of the clue
- Words that will be manipulated in some way to get to the answer (a.k.a. the “fodder”)
- Wordplay indicators, which tell us what to do to the fodder
For this clue there are two groups of indicators and fodder. The first is “opening Doctor”, which is telling us to take the “opening” of the word Doctor, i.e. the first letter. That gives us D.
Then we have “Pepper release all pressure”. In physics equations, pressure is represented by the letter P. So if we release all the P from “pepper”, we’re left with EER.
Put those together and you’ve got DEER, which fits the definition at the start: “does”—female deer.
There’s trickery at play here, but it’s never unfair. We’re given all the elements we need to solve the clue. Nothing was hidden. We were just… misled a little bit.
That’s the mark of a good clue: though the definition is right there, the phrasing misleads you about its real meaning. It’s a kind of punchline, and the more misdirection there is, the funnier it is when you get it.
That’s not the only kind of humour in cryptics—they also have a habit of veering into ribald or scatological territory (which might be one of the reasons they’re less popular in the US). For example, this piece of genius from Liam Runnalls:
I walked out of recital, concerned with crap production (6)
— The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 May 2026
The definition here is “concerned with crap production”. To solve it, we simply make the “I” walk out of “recital”, leaving us with RECTAL.
Other types of clues
Sometimes crosswords setters deviate from the definition+fodder+indicators formula and throw you a curveball.
Sometimes it’ll be a double definition, e.g. “Not seeing window covering (5)” (BLIND). Or even more rarely, three or more definitions, e.g. “Rabbit annoys insects (4)” (BUGS).
Often you’ll need to combine multiple wordplay indicators on the same fodder. For example, “Enclosure retreating in keg action” (4)”. In this clue “in” is a hidden-word indicator (i.e. the letters we need are inside something else), and “retreating” is telling is that letters are backwards. If we look inside the phrase “keg action”, we can extract the letters “eg ac” and reverse them, giving us CAGE, a type of enclosure.
A variation called the &lit clue has the entire text being both definition and wordplay. e.g. “Spoil vote! (4)”. We spoil the word “vote” by anagramming it, giving us VETO—a way to spoil a voting process.
Sometimes a clue will abandon even those kinds of structure, and be a pure lateral-thinking riddle. An example that always stuck in my mind was “One gets fed up with other people (8)” (CANNIBAL).
How I came to cryptics
In the last few years, I’ve been cutting back on social media and other kinds of brainrot. First I (mostly) ditched Facebook, then I completely ditched Twitter after it was bought by a fascist and filled with nazis. Then I cut down dramatically on the ultimate time vortex that is Reddit.
But I’m not made of stone. I still needed some kind of go-to timewaster on my phone to placate my itchy thumb. It just had to be something healthier than social media (which is a pretty low bar).
Partly I started browsing Hacker News each day, which I guess is technically still social media, but it’s a lot less predatory. It doesn’t even have infinite scroll, and after the first five pages or so I start seeing the same news items from yesterday, and the day’s browsing naturally comes to an end.
Then I started following blogs with an RSS reader. I used to follow a lot of blogs back in my university days, but gradually lost the habit along with a lot of other people after Google Reader was shut down (RIP Reader—neva 4get). RSS is a brilliant and underappreciated technology (Feeder is my RSS reader of choice), and despite the best efforts of social media companies, there are still plenty of interesting independent blogs out there. In fact, that’s what inspired me to start this one.
And my other substitute timewaster is cryptic crosswords.
Between these activities, I’ve mostly replaced my social media usage. I do still use Bluesky, but I tend to stick to the Following tab, which means there’s a natural limit on the number of posts for me to read each day.
How can I learn this power?
I got started with cryptics by playing Minute Cryptic, which has one clue per day. This is a great way to learn, because it’s less intimidating than trying to solve an entire puzzle grid, and there’s a video each day explaining how the clue works. There’s also a nice guide explaining some of the common types of wordplay you’ll see again and again.
From there, I graduated to attempting full crosswords. I found Arkadium’s “Best Daily Cryptic Crossword” pretty good early on, because it’s relatively easy and has a decent interface for mobile.
Even then, it took a while before I was able to solve a full puzzle. One pitfall of the Arkadium puzzles is they’re designed for a UK audience, and often feature references to British culture, geography, celebrities, and politicians, which often go over my head. Finding crosswords in your own country makes life a lot easier.
Finding good crosswords
Traditionally newspapers have been the main publishers of crossword puzzles, and that’s still true. There are some good options here in Australia, my favourites being the Saturday Paper and the Sydney Morning Herald (though they’re both paywalled). Lovatts also has a decent free daily cryptic.
The UK, birthplace of the cryptic, has them in many papers. The Guardian crossword is free, available world-wide, and seems to be less dependent on UK references compared to Arkadium. But it’s also pretty difficult.
Americans have fewer options. Cryptics didn’t really take off in the US the same way they did in the Commonwealth, for whatever reason, but there are some around.
Doing crosswords on mobile
Mobile is a great platform for crosswords because you can just chip away at a puzzle whenever you have a spare moment. Unfortunately different sources of crosswords have different interfaces which vary a lot in quality. Arkadium is probably the best I’ve found in terms of decent mobile UX.
I ended up vibe-coding an Android app that pulls in crosswords from several different sources and provides a good, consistent UX for them. It’s become one of my most used apps. I’d love to publish it somewhere, but sadly I can’t because it presumably violates the terms of service for the crossword publishers.
External help
My app also includes an anagram solver and a synonym finder, both of which filter their results according to any letters that have already been filled in. Some people might consider it cheating to use such tools. In my opinion, it’s a personal choice.
I’m sure crossword enthusiasts have always resorted to dictionaries and thesauruses when they’re stuck on a tricky clue, and if they had an automated anagram-solver, they would have used that too.
Personally, I’m not great at solving anagrams and don’t find it especially fun, so why would I do it? If a clue involves an anagram, the puzzle is in recognising that fact and figuring out which words serve as the fodder. From there, solving the anagram is just busy-work.
The synonym finder in my app is more of a last resort, for when racking my brains stops being fun.
Less doomscrolling, more crosswords
These days I complete a cryptic most days. Where social media makes people stressed and angry, crosswords are satisfying and fun. Social media companies want to drain your attention, degrade your mental health, mine your data, and advertise to you. Crossword setters want to give you an enjoyable 20 minutes, a healthy brain workout, and a good chuckle.
Maybe you should replace social media with crosswords too.