The New York Times Will Shortz's Wittiest, Wackiest Crosswords: 225 Puzzles from the Will Shortz Crossword Collection

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Edit – thanks to KVa and Alan C: a reversal (up, in a down clue) of LEG (pin) + C in A lot of NAKE[d] (raw)

Competition entries for the latest Prize crossword must be received by the first post on the Friday after the puzzle appears. The first five correct entries drawn will win a copy of Guardian Style and Secrets of the Setters. Completed Prize crosswords should be printed out and sent to: The Guardian Crossword, PO Box 6603, Birmingham, B26 3PR or fax to 0121 742 1313. How do I enter the Azed crossword competition? I can’t believe I filled in this whole puzzle when I only got 4 and 6 down at the start. The first of those gave me THE in 13a and which with the word count gave me A _ _ _ _ _ (in?) THE _ _ _. which the wordplay helped with, and I inched on from there. That said, I do have sympathy with those discombobulated by the sore/saw merger. It’s not just the presence or absence of an /r/, it’s the fact that the preceding vowel can sound completely different to many rhotic speakers. (Especially in those accents affected by the cot-caught merger, which includes much of Scotland, Ireland, Canada, the US and India. For many American English speakers, ‘saw’ rhymes (more or less) with ‘Shah’, while the vowel in ‘sore’ certainly doesn’t.) Third downer is, while both are involved in corporal punishment, birch and cane are not really synonymous.LEA/LEY: Chambers and the OED list three words with these (and other) spellings. The first is the meadow that you mention, and the second is arable land; the quote “The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea” more likely uses the first. Chambers gives different etymology for the two, but in view of the similarity of meaning, I would suspect that confusion is responsible for the convergence on the same group of spellings. We know people are experiencing issues with printing so we have outlined some details here that should help. My favourites, from a fine set of clues, were 1ac DANISH, 9ac SEVERE, 14 BREATHLESS, 18ac ENCOURAGED, 22ac UPSTREAm, 2dn NOVEMBER, 3dn STRENGTH, 5dn DEPRESSION and 17dn EDUCATOR. LEI[sure] (holiday) minus ‘sure’ (certain): a garland given as a gift to visitors to Hawaii – see here

Arcing is a type of electrical discharge that occurs when electrons flow between two conductors, usually metal, in an environment with a gas or vacuum. The conductors can be wires, rods, or other objects that are capable of carrying an electrical current.’)

I thought of trying DOER where SHER is, since a doe is a female of various species, and a doer is an actor. But then “old” in the clue wouldn’t have been doing anything–doer is a rare word, but not a particularly archaic one. ShropshireLass @55: who imagined that the proximity of the L to the colon on the keyboard could produce such striking results? 🙂 ]

It took me a long time to think of looking up the unlikely-looking ARCING, which I couldn’t explain: This is designed for blind or partially-sighted users. It is a stripped down text version, which should be easily read by a screen reader. Which crosswords have competitions? Cryptic definition, a boater being a kind of hat, the question mark indicating definition by example muffin @53 – I would see ‘apply’ (with qm) as one of Paul’s whimsical adjectival constructs, like ‘jetty’ = ‘a bit like a jet’. Fwiw Wiktionary has apply as an alternative spelling of appley. And come to think of it, if stubble can be stubbly, and a bobble can be bobbly, why can’t an apple be apply?Second downer is re 20a. Although I’m a maths grad and I recognise the “below”, imho it’s wrong to include “e” for eccentricity in a cryptic of this nature

For all newspaper-published crosswords that appear online from Wednesday 10 February 2010 a PDF version will appear beneath the crossword’s title and alongside the Print version and the Blind & PS version. CORPS (large body) + a reversal (turned up, in a down clue) of DE (of French) – I remember this definition being unfamiliar to some solvers in previous blogs: it’s a word we used often used at school The cryptic grammar (I follow) doesn’t quite work here – a pity, since the setter dealt with I effectively in the previous clue and in 8dnOh dear, I do seem to be moaning this morning.( Good Morning. Good Moaning – the ‘Allo ‘Allo French Policeman’s syndrome