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.” 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. 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.

Puzzles Home - Telegraph Puzzles

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.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.

Daily Online Crossword Puzzle - The Atlantic

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. Editor’s Note: The Atlantic Crossword is a mini puzzle that gets more challenging each weekday. See if you can solve today’s puzzle. A TENDER NAME anagrams to ENDEARMENT; BOTTOMS UP is a jumble of PUB'S MOTTO; and, as my wife reminds me when she's not in the mood for talking, VOICES RANT ON can become CONVERSATION.

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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.” 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. 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.