Puzzling

The next clue device we're going to cover is the charade clue. What on earth?!, you ask, and with good cause! Well, you know the parlour game of charades (not that we actually play them any more!)? People guess the name of a book, or a movie, or whatever, and you act out the name in pieces, possibly syllable by syllable, or word by word? Well, these cryptic clues are sort of the same, in that you string together the components of the clue, one after the other, in order. So, for example, the word WHEEL could be clued as W + HEEL. That's a charade, one bit after the other, in order. A few more examples: SLIGHT = S + LIGHT, MANDRAKE = MAN + DRAKE, and GOSLING = GO + SLING. This is a very common cryptic device, and you will come across charade clues in every cryptic crossword. s you can see, it's quite common to need to clue a single letter (such as the W in W+HEEL), so abbreviations are widely used in charade clues. Charades can also be used in conjunction with other devic...