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Cryptic crosswords for beginners: Foreign words

Alan Connor demystifies the devices used in cryptic crosswords for beginners and asks experienced solvers to share their favourite examples. This week: short words from other languages
Les Misérables – s handy way of cluing LES. Photograph: Allstar/Universal Pictures/Sportsphoto Ltd

Crosswords, in British papers at least, are all about playing with the English language. Sometimes, though, you need a tiny bit of the old parlez-vous from one of our European neighbours.

A quick reminder: cryptic clues typically offer two ways to find the answer, in either order: a definition (indicated in bold in the examples that follow) and some wordplay (look out for italics and colours.).

One other thing: the examples below are isolated from the rest of the grid; in a genuine puzzle environment, you'd probably have some letters available from other clues, making your job a little easier. As they say in France, courage!

How does it work?

Crossword setters like to break down words into bits and pieces, finding a way of indicating each bit and every piece and leaving to you the pleasure of putting them back together.

If one of the pieces of the answer is a couple of letters such as LA or IL or EL, one option open to the setter is identifying those letters by what they mean not in English but in another language.

Hopefully, just a glance at LA or IL or EL will be enough for you to know which language we're likely to be talking about in each case. We're not looking for obscure pieces of vocabulary here: the language involved is typically French, Spanish, Italian or German and the word you're being asked to translate is something along the lines of "the", "a", "yes", "no", and/or possibly "and" or "or". You don't need to know the German for "power station" or the Spanish for "the boy child". Not today, anyway.

Also, French is the most common language used, which is only fair since that's the language most studied in British schools. Perhaps the crosswords of the next generation will slip little Mandarin glides into clues, but for the moment, all that's asked of you is a shaky grasp of some of the languages of mainland Europe.

Some examples

So it's short words we're looking for and the device is usually used to indicate only part of the answer, as in this clue from Falcon:

13ac The French determined to survive (4,3)

Here you take a word for "the" in French, LA and then a word meaning "determined", STOUT and combine them for the answer, LAST OUT. Note that Falcon doesn't use the expression "the word 'the' in the French language" in his clue - that would be clunky. "The French" is enough to take you to LA-LA Land.

Here's another, from Araucaria:

10ac Steal the Spanish coin (6)

You put reals, pesetas and even euros out of your mind: the word "Spanish" has done its business before we get to "coin" and the answer is NICK followed by EL for NICKEL.

One more from the Romance languages, this time from the Observer's Everyman crossword:

20d Young dog ahead of the Italian student (5)

Here it's an IL that helps you to PUPIL - and finally Hectence might make you think of a war film...

3d Fight with the German prison officer (6)

… as you get to the answer WARDER.

Got the idea? Sehr gut.

So how to spot them?

The friendliest indicators of this technique are the names of those languages: French, Spanish, Italian and German. Watch out though for the names of cities and regions doing the same job. Here's another Everyman:

26ac Want the Parisian to show pointer on dial (6)

Here "the Parisian" serves the same purpose as "the French" above and the answer is NEEDLE.

It's not always that simple

In the examples above, the bits and pieces making up the answer follow, one after another, in the same order in the clue as they are in the answer. Sometimes, though, you may have to use one of the other devices discussed in this series.

For example, sometimes you need to put one part of the clue inside another, and so it is with little foreign words. Here, Crux is asking you do just that …

28ac Raised objection about the Italian (5)

...and put a word for an objection, a BUT, around the IL to build BUILT.

Another means of misleading you is to indicate the French language not by "French", or even "Parisian" but by reference to a French city you may not immediately recognise as such. Radian is being entirely fair when he uses...

13ac Nancy's what separates those left in bidding (7)

… to clue REQUEST, although he knows full well that the setter's immediate reading will have Nancy as a woman and not as the former capital of the Duchy of Lorraine.

… and how to enjoy them

The appeal of these clues is the economical way that they yield imagery with pleasing detail. In the examples above, it's more evocative to suggest a dog ahead of an Italian undergraduate or a bustup in a German prison than would be the case without those nationalities.

The device itself is also economical in terms of the conciseness of the clues. Here's a winning, snappy example from the Telegraph...

2d Discourage the German and French in embrace (5)

… where the answer is DETER. As that example suggests, setters are not above using two foreign words and here Dante does that with an indefinite article followed by a definite one …

24d Not above using two foreign articles (5)

… UN and DER for UNDER.

Over to you

To the beginners: any other questions? To the addicts: any much-loved examples to share? And to everyone, I'm especially fond of this memorable clue by Radler from the monthly prize competition at the Telegraph solvers' blog Big Dave:

13ac One from Germany originating special theory then another one (8)

Hopefully, having read the above and our guide to initial-letter clues, you won't feel you need to be EINSTEIN to get what's going on.

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