The New York Times Will Shortz's Wittiest, Wackiest Crosswords: 225 Puzzles from the Will Shortz Crossword Collection

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LEA/LEY: Chambers and the OED list three words with these (and other) spellings. The first is the meadow that you mention, and the second is arable land; the quote “The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea” more likely uses the first. Chambers gives different etymology for the two, but in view of the similarity of meaning, I would suspect that confusion is responsible for the convergence on the same group of spellings. Now that’s off my chest: I actually found this mostly enjoyable and a touch easier than previous from the same setter. I needed help with TITOIST (would never have got there on my own, to be fair) but almost all the rest was a steady, reasonably challenging solve, albeit with some solutions from definition and crossers without really understanding the parsing til I got here. I noticed three Frenchisms which suited this Francophone but may have been a little trop for some… Atlanta Dave @59 – I thought the same (and given your parenthetical remarks you might want to skip the rest of this post 😉 ) Cryptic definition, a boater being a kind of hat, the question mark indicating definition by example

This web-only prize crossword is published on the first Monday of the month. You can fill it in on theguardian.com and submit your prize entry online.I thought of trying DOER where SHER is, since a doe is a female of various species, and a doer is an actor. But then “old” in the clue wouldn’t have been doing anything–doer is a rare word, but not a particularly archaic one. Arcing is a type of electrical discharge that occurs when electrons flow between two conductors, usually metal, in an environment with a gas or vacuum. The conductors can be wires, rods, or other objects that are capable of carrying an electrical current.’) C (chapter) + an anagram (about) of FOUR – I have happy memories of visiting these delightful locations (worth a look) on a holiday in Corfu

Edit – thanks to KVa and Alan C: a reversal (up, in a down clue) of LEG (pin) + C in A lot of NAKE[d] (raw) GROSS OUT: that is why I underlined just ‘disgust (verb) as definition, leaving ‘show’ as a link word. CORPS (large body) + a reversal (turned up, in a down clue) of DE (of French) – I remember this definition being unfamiliar to some solvers in previous blogs: it’s a word we used often used at school DE (inDEed at heart, which took a minute or two to work out – nice misdirection) + PRESS) (iron) + I[r]ON) minus r (right) We know people are experiencing issues with printing so we have outlined some details here that should help.Second downer is re 20a. Although I’m a maths grad and I recognise the “below”, imho it’s wrong to include “e” for eccentricity in a cryptic of this nature For all newspaper-published crosswords that appear online from Wednesday 10 February 2010 a PDF version will appear beneath the crossword’s title and alongside the Print version and the Blind & PS version. ShropshireLass @55: who imagined that the proximity of the L to the colon on the keyboard could produce such striking results? 🙂 ] It took me a long time to think of looking up the unlikely-looking ARCING, which I couldn’t explain: eccentricity: in a conic section, the constant ratio of the distance of a point on the curve from the focus to its distance from the directrix (usually represented by e; (geom)’