The Telegraph Cross Atlantic Crosswords 1

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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. Importantly, even though our Cross Atlantics look like American-style puzzles, the clues and answers are as British as it gets. You won’t be expected to know your FDA from your NBA, or your FBI from your CSI. It’s no coincidence that this rugby-themed puzzle is appearing on the same day as the Superbowl, after all. Caleb Madison, our talented puzzle creator, is carrying on a tradition first established by The Atlantic’s founders in 1857, when they promised to care for their readership’s “healthy appetite of the mind for entertainment in its various forms.” The Atlantic is a place for news, reported analysis, criticism, investigations, and commentary, yes, but also a place for humor, wit, and delight. 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.

The Atlantic Crossword: A New Daily Puzzle - The Atlantic The Atlantic Crossword: A New Daily Puzzle - The Atlantic

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. We’ve been working with academics and scientists to identify the behaviour that promotes brain health,’ says Silver. Telegraph Puzzles Editor Chris Lancaster notes that research suggests solving is ‘good for exercising your brain. Puzzles probably can’t stop the onset of dementia, but keeping mentally active may contribute to people being affected only later, or more slowly.’ A happy distraction that may actually be good for you: what’s not to like? Of course, while Cross Atlantic looks across the ocean for inspiration, it is resolutely British in the detail of its clues and solutions, exploring our culture, language, general knowledge and mores. This is a crossword, says Silver, ‘wearing a bowler hat, carrying a briefcase, with a rolled-up umbrella under its arm. It has a British accent. All of the references are British.’ Assembled by the country’s best compilers, it will have, he says, ‘a real British twist, with that sense of fun and character’. No other British newspaper regularly offers anything like it. However, the fact that THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL PARTY is a jumble of OH, NASTY TARTAN POLITICS still raises a smile. These all belong to a specific class of anagrams that provides more entertainment than most: the aptagram. All of this was evidence of “an age of restless intellectualism,” writers argued. Columnists coined words such as crossworditis. People worried that puzzles would replace literature, that the utility of three-letter words— gnu! emu! eel!—would rewire people’s brains. Word games were derided as childish, even as a form of madness. “There is a taste for raw meat,” the legendary ad man George Burton Hotchkiss said in 1924. “Plain speaking has become fashionable. Entertainment is sought more widely than instruction, possibly because information is too cheap.”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.) 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.

Sink your teeth into our Pancake Day crossword - The Telegraph

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.Aptagram" may sound like a made-up word, but its meaning is as it sounds: an anagram of a word which is apt when taking into account its meaning. It's a fairly recent coinage, as for many years this kind of wordplay was known as a cognate anagram, "cognate" meaning "derived from the same root". There's no doubt that "aptagram" is far snappier. 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). Past puzzles have incorporated playing cards, people called Brian and even titles of 1980s pop hits spiced up with names of curries. This time, thinking of Spare might help you to the end. 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. You can expect some of the answers of today’s Cross Atlantic to relate to the countries within the Six Nations. The theme is signposted quite clearly; straight off the bat (to use a non-rugby sporting phrase), you might notice the following clue: