Crossword blog: how 'clever' are cryptic solvers?

Good news, everyone: it’s New Research Time!

There’s an article in the open-access journal Frontiers about the solvers of cryptic crosswords. It’s by Kathryn Friedlander and Philip Fine of the University of Buckingham and it’s titled The Grounded Expertise Components Approach in the Novel Area of Cryptic Crossword Solving.

Now, I’ve long argued that the British cryptic crossword is an intellectual puzzle that is open to all. It wasn’t always so: in the early days, broadsheets wanted to distance their cryptic offering from the plebeian quick crossword by requiring solvers to recall Latin tags and fill gaps from memory in poetic quotations.

Nowadays, once you’ve got your head around the devices that tend to be used (as explained in our Cryptics for Beginners series), you can solve most cryptics by spotting double-meanings in everyday language and moving letters around. Anyone, I tend to insist, can do that.

But The Grounded Expertise Components Approach in the Novel Area of Cryptic Crossword Solving tells us that not everyone does do it. The article peers at 800 solvers, half of them “Ordinary” (who might often leave a puzzle with some unfilled squares) and half “Expert” (who, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Fry, possess “the ability to do the Times crossword while shaving”).

Across both groups of participants, 80% have an honours degree, and 10% a doctorate. In other words, yikes: those are some terrifyingly educated people. I’m wont to give little talks in libraries of an evening about crosswords and while I may continue to bang an “open-to-all (in principle)” drum, I should probably concede that those who choose to solve skew towards the eggheaded.

And it’s a certain type of eggheadedness that emerges from the article. That Fry quote is from his novel The Liar, wherein it is explained that when Bletchley Park was recruiting people to crack German codes, mathematicians were more useful than linguists. And while we tend to think of crosswords as a broadly literary activity, the army of cryptic solvers has many, many more people than you might have imagined with a background in maths or IT.

As Friedlander and Fine put it ...

... cryptic crossword skill therefore appears to be bound up with code-cracking and problem-solving skills of a quasi-algebraic nature. Conversely, lexical ability, although no doubt valuable, does not appear to be a critical discriminator of high expertise among elite solvers.

Take a look at the paper: there are plenty more goodies for crossword devotees to chew over, including why we solve, how often we do so, how we tend to rate on the fascinating Need for Cognition Scale and the finding that ...

Interestingly, playing Scrabble and solving non-cryptic crosswords were comparatively unpopular hobbies.

And what about you lot? Specifically, are you Stem people (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)? My day job would have me as a tweedy writer, but I did start my adult life by applying to be a statistician at the Census Office. Put another way: do we have here a group who would have been whizzes at decoding German messages, but who deploy those skills solely in the pursuit of fun?

The results of our SETTER clueing competition should appear next week.