Never A Crossed Word

Cryptic Crosswords
Part Sixteen

We have reached the end, well, almost the end, of our tour through the world of cryptic crosswords. Before we hang up our pencils for a while, we just have the small matter of three clues to fill in.


In our post on Spoonerisms we had just one clue to solve.

13 Across

Spooner's rosy cheeked birds suffered defeats. (8, 5)

So what we needed for this clue is a phrase which means 'rosy cheeked birds' which was also a spoonerism for 'suffered defeats'. Our birds are crows, indeed 'blushing crows' which goes through the spoonerism process to become 'crushing blows'.

From spoonerisms we moved to the ultimate cryptic clue, the pure cryptic and I left you with a pair of perplexing problems to solve.

11 Across

How the mouse gets around perhaps? 

This clue is all about how you use a mouse to navigate a website, despite the suggestion that it could be about little mice driving cars. To navigate using a mouse, apart from clicking and dragging, you use the wheel on the mouse to scroll, and scroll is our answer

11 Down

Religious men seek onion perhaps?

What goes with onion, you may well have asked yourself and the answer is, well lots of things, but the one you were looking for was sage, as in the popular stuffing flavour. Our religious men therefore, are sages. 

So that's it, you cryptic crossword grid should now be complete, if it isn't then you've probably missed a post somewhere down the line. You can find a guide for which clue is in which post here, along with some extra bits and pieces on cryptic crosswords. 

If you have enjoyed these posts then do go out and get yourself a book of cryptic and have a go, you'll be surprised how often the clues we have covered come up. That being said we've still only scratched the surface of cryptic crosswords, we'll be returning to them in 2014. 

So until next time do keep puzzling.