Charades, and what two solvers at one pub table get right together
Charades are the clue type I find most satisfying to crack, because the answer arrives in pieces and clicks together at the end. They are also the type we solve best as a pair, and this entry is as much about the Thursday table as about the clues.
1Building an answer out of parts
A charade clue assembles its answer from two or more pieces placed side by side, each clued separately, usually in the order they appear in the answer. The name comes from the old parlour game in which a word was acted out syllable by syllable. Motor and favourite make floor covering (6) is one I made up for this page: motor gives CAR, favourite gives PET, and together they make CARPET, the floor covering at the end of the clue. The word and is just glue, and make links the wordplay to the definition.
Most charades are more elaborate than that, and the extra difficulty comes from translation. Each piece has to be found separately, and each can be an abbreviation, a synonym or a short word disguised as something else. Average boy becomes vicar (6) needs average to turn into PAR, in the golfing sense, and boy to turn into SON, before PARSON appears. Neither step is hard. The hard part is choosing the right meaning of a common word out of the dozen it might have.
The charade is also the clue type that combines most freely with the others. A long answer might be built from an abbreviation, a short anagram and a container, laid end to end with a few link words between them. When I can see that a clue has several distinct chunks but none of them leaps out as an anagram or a hidden, a charade is the first thing I assume. It is rarely wrong as a starting point, even when the final parse turns out to be more complicated.
2How the table works
The Thursday table is in the corner of a pub off Upper Street, under a window that rattles whenever a bus goes past. We have met there since the autumn of 2022, most weeks, with one printed copy of a weekday cryptic from a broadsheet and two pens of different colours. The colours are not a way of keeping score. They are there so that when we look back at a finished grid we can see which of us found what, and that has been more instructive than either of us expected.
The division of labour happened without being planned. I am faster on anagrams and hiddens, the clues where the letters are all on the page. My partner is much better at charades and at anything that needs a word translated sideways, a skill she puts down to years of reading old novels with a dictionary open beside her. Between us we tend to split a grid roughly in half, but the most satisfying clues are nearly always the ones where one of us finds the first piece and the other finishes it.
There are house rules, and they are few. No phones on the table, because an answer checker kills the evening. One of us writes while the other reads the clue aloud, and we swap each time a round is finished. If a clue has stalled for more than five minutes it is set aside, and we come back to it only once every other clue in that corner has been tried. Neither of us looks up the solution before the following Thursday.
Worked through at the table
- One printed grid, two pens of different colours
- The clue is read aloud before anyone writes
- Stalled for five minutes means set aside for now
- No checking answers until the grid is finished or abandoned
3Reading a clue aloud
The rule about reading aloud started as a courtesy, so that both of us had the same clue in our heads, and became the most useful habit we have. Reading a clue aloud forces you to give it a rhythm, and the rhythm usually falls on the surface reading, the sentence the setter wants you to hear. Once we have both heard it that way, one of us reads it again with pauses in unnatural places, and the charade pieces often separate themselves in that second reading.
Not frozen water? Spot it (6) is a clue I set her one evening to demonstrate. Read smoothly, it sounds like an idle question about ice. Read with a pause after not and another after water, the pieces NOT and ICE come apart, and the question mark stops being decorative. Spot is the definition and NOTICE is the answer. She got it in about four seconds and was unimpressed, which is exactly the right response to a clue that easy.
The harder published charades work the same way but with more pieces and less forgiving breaks. We often end up writing the clue out with a vertical line at each candidate break, then testing each chunk for an abbreviation, a synonym or an anagram. It is slow, and it is the method we fall back on when everything else has failed. Sometimes it fails as well, and then we are into the last and least pleasant part of the evening.
4Giving up with good grace
We do not finish every grid. Over four years I would guess we complete about three weeks in four, and the unfinished ones usually have two or three clues left in a single corner. The discipline is to stop before the evening turns sour. At closing time or at the third stalled clue, whichever comes first, we fold the grid, photograph it for the notebook and leave the rest until the solution appears in the paper the following day.
Reading those solutions together the next week is part of the ritual. For each clue we missed, we try to name the exact step where we went wrong: a definition read from the wrong end, an indicator not recognised, an abbreviation we did not know, or a charade split in the wrong place. That last one is the most common for both of us, and the notebook now has a page of the splits that fooled us, written up in two colours of ink.
Those pages about failed splits are the most useful I keep, more useful than the lists of indicators, because they record the setters' habits rather than the language. After four years I can feel a charade breaking in the wrong place before I have finished the parse. I would never have learned that alone on the train. It needed another solver at the table, stubborn enough to insist on a different reading and patient enough to wait while I came round to it.
Worked through at the table
- Definition read from the wrong end
- Indicator not recognised as an indicator
- Stock abbreviation not known
- Charade split in the wrong place, the commonest by far
Example clues on this page were written for the notebook, and the parses were checked twice, once on the train and once at home. Last corrected 12 Sept 2026.