The Telegraph Cross Atlantic Crosswords 1

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Happy Shrove Tuesday – or as many might know it better, Pancake Day. I always associate Pancake Day with a strange thing: my dad standing by the stovetop. It was an unusual sight as my mother is the superior chef, but he’d produce dozens of glorious crepes for us children to inhale. Here, says The Telegraph’s Dan Silver, in charge of the new project, is a game that will give the successful solver that small yet potent glow of pride in their achievement, while being fun and accessible, too. It will not require being steeped in the lore of the game, but will plumb the depths of recall and knowledge, and hopefully do you a bit of good along the way.

Daily Online Crossword Puzzle - The Atlantic

Today, the smartphone is the attention portal that stirs the most awe and anxiety. A century ago, the crossword puzzle occupied this cultural space. Editor’s Note: The Atlantic Crossword is a mini puzzle that gets more challenging each weekday. See if you can solve today’s puzzle. The miracle and menace of each era is original, but the debate over how Americans spend their time remains extraordinarily consistent over the decades.

These all belong to a specific class of anagrams that provides more entertainment than most: the aptagram. Not until September 1977 did The Atlantic launch its own beloved crossword puzzle, The Atlantic Puzzler, created by a couple now known as puzzle-making royalty, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon. The duo also ran a biweekly word game for The Atlantic on America Online beginning in March 1995. The Puzzler ended its run in print in 2006, but was briefly revived online. (Its fans complained “loudly and sometimes in Latin” about this move, according to a report at the time.) Other words or phrases don't quite anagram to give something of identical meaning, but instead give something very close to the original. DIRTY ROOM becomes DORMITORY; DEBIT CARD contains all the letters of BAD CREDIT; I'LL MAKE A WISE PHRASE jumbles to WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

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Today, at a moment when entertainment and information are again so curiously intertwined, when the pace of the news cycle is punishing and the information ecosystem itself is profoundly chaotic, The Atlantic is again creating a cozy and reliable space for crossword puzzles. The Atlantic Crossword is a mini puzzle, constructed with the smartphone player in mind, that gets a little bigger and a little more challenging each weekday. (You can also play your way through our archive of past puzzles.) The best thing about aptagrams is that they do sometimes relate to current news stories. I'm indebted to those who have been in touch over the last week or so to remind me of two such instances.The first crosswords appeared in newspapers during the Woodrow Wilson presidency, in the years leading up to World War I. Panic began, as it often does, among those who derived deeper meaning from the fad’s furious popularity—the people who saw it as evidence of more dramatic changes under way. (See also: the fidget spinner. And, for that matter, the telegraph.) It’s made quite the wave, the furthermost ripples of which have found their way into today’s Telegraph puzzles. If you’re somebody who uses brainteasers as a means to break the cycle of doomscrolling seemingly endless bad news, you might want to look away now. However, the fact that THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL PARTY is a jumble of OH, NASTY TARTAN POLITICS still raises a smile. With the new puzzle joining a stable of games from the ‘Mini’ – a new 5x5 crossword – to the Toughie – an established super-hard cryptic – there will be something for everyone, expert or dabbler. The beginner may find themselves hooked and stay on, trying out ever-harder puzzles. The genius of Cross Atlantic is the diversity in its clues which, while never formally cryptic, will get readers thinking laterally. ‘As one does to an unfit boiler’ runs one in the opening puzzle. I won’t tell you the answer, but it’s a play on words that gets the mind moving just as far and fast as any Toughie, yet which everyone will know.

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Perhaps the most well-known example is "moon starer", which is an anagram of ASTRONOMER. This may be slightly unfair on Galileo et al, as the Moon is only one heavenly body out of countless billions, but there's no doubt that it's appropriate. Over the past few weeks, most of us will have been thrilled, disgusted or bored by the Duke of Sussex’s autobiography, Spare. If you’ve managed to avoid reading any excerpts, that’s quite an achievement, given how the book’s contents have found their way into every nook and cranny of news, social media and beyond.If you’re looking for a little less royal drama in your puzzles, Cross Atlantic 63 has just a dusting of information related to Spare. Many of our new Cross Atlantic puzzles, which are US-style crosswords with a distinctive British flavour, take on personalities of their own by having themes running through them. Dan Silver: “This is an American-style crossword but wearing a bowler hat, carrying a briefcase, with a rolled up umbrella under its arm, and a British accent.” The machine room at Bletchley Park, where Britain’s WWII code-breakers worked to decipher Nazi messages Some of the puzzles we’ve been running at The Telegraph have been around for decades and decades. Our world famous Cryptic Crossword, for example, is known for playing a crucial part in World War II. In 1942, it was used to test the wits of the fastest solvers in the country, which led to the best of them being invited to work as code-breakers at Bletchley Park. Even with our long history of puzzling, we’re dedicated to giving you new and exciting puzzles. This is where Cross Atlantic comes in.

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You’ll find references to the book, various members of the royal family and even Frogmore Cottage, erstwhile home of Harry and Meghan. Don’t worry if you’ve studiously avoided all of the articles, podcast and television coverage of the book; the beauty of a Mini Crossword is that by solving just one clue, you straightaway get letters to help you find three or four other answers.This year, I’m already trying to be better about my eating habits, so I’ve not got a whole lot to give up. Although I might try my hand at my dad’s pancake recipe, just to keep the tradition going. At least that’s what I’m going to tell my trainer. Perhaps best of all, anyone of a mathematical bent may appreciate the fact that ELEVEN PLUS TWO is an anagram of TWELVE PLUS ONE. And now there’s Cross Atlantic, too. It is that rare treat: a new puzzle, to be published every weekend and daily online, in our own Telegraph, a newspaper that knows a thing or two about the genre, having delivered its first crossword to readers almost a century ago, years before Fleet Street rivals cottoned on. The name of the new game gives a hint of its origins: American crosswords whose clues engagingly blend wordplay, odd definitions, colloquialisms, general knowledge and current affairs, stretching and testing the brain without the forbidding challenge that the cryptic grid presents to the uninitiated (and which, in the 1940s, prompted Bletchley Park to use the Telegraph crossword as a test to recruit new code-breakers). There’s a little something for everyone, no matter what your skill level or how much time you have; our Mini Crossword and PlusWord should only take a couple of minutes of your time each day.