How do you decide whether a word is worthy of being clued?
During our competition to clue WHITE KNIGHT, solver Catarella paused for a spot of philosophy:
I wonder if all the clues that are giving some sort of synonym for a chess piece are quite playing fair (including my own). Obviously, it’s a chess piece, but it wouldn’t be in a crossword because it’s a chess piece. If I solved a puzzle and found black pawn to be one of the solutions I’d feel a bit miffed.
Our main criterion is that we like our entries to have ‘dictionary nature.’ A word or phrase has dictionary nature if it appears in a dictionary, if it would appear in a theoretical, large-enough dictionary, or if it appears or would appear in a plausible list.
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