Learning anagram indicators one notebook page at a time
Anagrams were the first clue type I could reliably spot, and for about a year they were also the only one. This entry is about the slower second stage, where spotting an anagram stops being the hard part and knowing which word is telling you to rearrange becomes the whole game.
1What an anagram clue is actually made of
Every anagram clue has three parts, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see them as separate things. There is the definition, which sits at the start or the end of the clue and means the answer in the ordinary way. There is the fodder, the letters that will be rearranged, which have to appear in the clue exactly and in full. And there is the indicator, a word or short phrase telling you the fodder is to be mixed up. Everything else is link words and surface, the innocent sentence the setter has disguised it all as.
A simple example, one I made up for this page: Pastel crockery, broken (6). Crockery is the definition. Pastel is the fodder, six letters, which matches the number in brackets. Broken is the indicator. Rearrange P, A, S, T, E and L and you get PLATES, which is crockery. The surface reading suggests somebody dropping a nice cup, and that picture is the whole disguise. Once you look for the three pieces rather than for meaning, the sentence comes apart in your hands.
What the example hides is that on the page none of the three pieces is labelled. A good setter chooses fodder that reads as an ordinary word in the surface, and an indicator that looks like an adjective doing honest work. Broken crockery is exactly what a normal person would write. That is why the indicator list matters so much to a learner. If you do not recognise broken as an instruction, you read the clue the way the setter hoped you would, and you stay stuck.
2The notebook page, and how it filled up
In the first spring I kept a page at the back of a pocket notebook headed with a single word, mixers. Every time I solved an anagram, or failed to and read the explanation the next day, I wrote the indicator on that page. Within a month it had the obvious ones: broken, wild, mad, badly, out, novel, new and changed. Within three months it had spilled onto a second page and started to include words I would never have guessed, like remarkably, possibly, dancing, cooked, drunk, in trouble and all over the place.
The useful thing about building the list myself, rather than copying one, was that every entry came with a memory attached. I remember sitting on a stationary train outside Old Street when shaken finally registered, because I had read it three times as a description of a person. The list stopped being a vocabulary test and became a record of the moments the penny dropped, which made it stick far better than anything I had tried to memorise from a book.
Around the sixth month I started grouping the entries by the idea behind them, and that grouping is what really helped. Once you see that setters are reaching for anything suggesting damage, disorder, drink, cooking, movement, novelty or error, you can recognise an indicator you have never met before. Assembled, reformed and at sea all look new until you ask which family they belong to, and after that they look obvious.
Worked through at the table
- Damage: broken, smashed, ruined, damaged, wrecked
- Disorder: wild, messy, chaotic, all over the place
- Drink: drunk, tipsy, sloshed, merry
- Cooking and movement: cooked, stewed, dancing, shaken, stirred
- Novelty and error: new, novel, fresh, wrong, badly, possibly
3The words that only sometimes mean rearrange
The traps are the small, common words that do several jobs. Out is one. Sometimes it tells you to rearrange the fodder, as in listen out, which can give you SILENT or TINSEL or ENLIST. Sometimes it means that letters are to be removed, and sometimes it simply means out, as in not at home, and stands in for a short word like AWAY or OFF. About is worse. It can be an anagram indicator, a container instruction, a reversal in a down clue, or the abbreviations C, CA or RE.
What I do with those words now is write them in the margin with a question mark and hold back from committing. On the train I often solve two or three crossing answers first and let the letters decide which reading of about was meant. My Thursday partner does the opposite and runs through every interpretation in her head, which is faster when it works and exhausting to watch when it does not. Neither method is right. The only wrong move is assuming the first job you think of is the one the setter chose.
A useful test is to ask whether the would-be fodder has exactly the right number of letters. If the clue says (7) and the words next to about add up to seven letters, the anagram reading goes to the top of the list. If they add up to five, about is probably doing something else, and the missing letters are coming from elsewhere, perhaps from about itself as CA or RE. Counting is dull, but it has saved me from more wrong answers than any clever insight ever has.
4Counting letters before writing anything in
The worst habit I had as a beginner was writing in an answer that fitted the definition and roughly used the right letters. On a train that is fatal, because a biro does not rub out and a mistake in the corner of a grid poisons every crossing light. I now write the fodder letters in a small ring in the margin, cross them off as I build the answer, and fill the squares only when the ring is empty. It adds perhaps ten seconds to each anagram and it has almost ended the crossings I used to spoil.
The ring has a second benefit I did not expect. Laying the letters out in a circle rather than in their original order breaks the grip of the word you started with. Looking at P, A, S, T, E and L written as a line, I kept seeing pastel and staple. Written in a ring, with the vowels spread apart, plates came almost at once. Plenty of solvers do this and I did not invent it, but I resisted it for a year because it felt like cheating, and it is nothing of the kind.
The other rule is the one my notebook page now carries at the top: an anagram answer must use every letter of the fodder once, and nothing else. If there is a letter left over, or one short, the parse is wrong even when the answer looks lovely. A lovely wrong answer is the most dangerous thing in a grid. Last winter one cost the two of us a full half hour at the Thursday table, and we still argue about whose idea it was in the first place.
Worked through at the table
- Find the definition at one end and set it aside
- Mark the word you suspect is the indicator
- Count the fodder letters against the number in brackets
- Write the letters in a ring, then cross them off one at a time
- Fill the squares only once every letter has been used
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 14 Jun 2025.