Clueing really long solutions in a crossword

In his guest post on 2 November 2012, Gordon Holt discussed the technique of using anagrams to clue long words or phrases in a cryptic crossword. Here, he looks at how other clueing devices may come into play with long solutions that span 15 letters or more. Gordon Holt aka Otterden is a crossword setter for the British weekly New Statesman.

The construction of a clue for a lengthy solution is often problematic for a compiler because clueing for several letters together can tend to be awkward and tortuous. In the absence of an overall anagram that works, an amalgam of various other devices may be necessary, and it is not often possible to string these together fluently in a strict item-by-item charade format. However, if a charade is possible, it gives the clue some sort of structure giving a solver a reasonable chance to unravel it.

A simple example:

Excitable reviewer friend acted over censoriously (15)
The answer is HYPERCRITICALLY: HYPER (excitable) CRITIC (reviewer) ALLY (friend)

A more complex example containing five different elements:

Bad temper display after a party member on phone goes on and on  (9,6) 
This leads to PERPETUUM MOBILE: PER (a) PET (bad temper display) UU (party: Ulster Unionists) M (member) MOBILE (phone)

Multi-word long answers also give the compiler a chance to devise wordplay in which the building blocks of the charade cross the word-breaks in the solution.

Clues for long entries which use a mixture of other clueing devices are quite possible of course, but require considerable ingenuity to set, especially if a smooth face reading is striven for. A splendid recent example, using three insertions and a deletion, by the great Araucaria of The Guardian:

School friends' payment kept by head female in a church garment shortened, one with a tin with nothing in it (6-7,11)
The answer is PARENT-TEACHER ASSOCIATION: RENT (payment) in i.e. kept by PATE (head) + HER (female) in A CASSOC[k] (church garment shortened) I (one) A TIN round O (nothing).

Dealing with of a long quotation is another problem area for setters, but sometimes the task of breaking one down into separately clued bits and pieces can be avoided. For instance, the famous Shakespearean 30-letter line from Hamlet TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE QUESTION could be dealt with in a fun way by saying:

Familiar quote might have been heard when casting for Spiderman
Here the homophonic reference is to Tobey (Maguire), the actor selected for the role in the Spiderman films.

Another example is the 51-letter solution string from Shakespeare's As You Like It: ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE AND ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN MERELY PLAYERS. This could be clued as:

'Global' declaration heard in London this summer providing planetary overview
This clue may need some explanation for non-UK solvers: in 2009 when the puzzle was published in UK's New Statesman, the seasonal presentation at the famous Globe theatre was As You Like It.

As I mentioned in my previous post, one problem with solutions which run into multiple words, particularly where some are of one, two or three letter length, is that with a bit of thought and only a few checking letters it may be possible for a solver to get to the answer without needing help from the actual clue wordplay...and all of a compiler's hard work is sidestepped!

It may be possible to clue a long solution word by double definition and a fun example which readers might like to solve is:

Sensible quality of Frankenstein's monster (5-10)

Related Posts:

• Clueing long solutions with anagrams ~ Otterden
• 3-Segment Container Clues: {A in (B+C)}
• Camouflaging anagrams ~ Tony Chesterley

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