The answer would be SUFFRAGIST, which is “someone who wants women to vote”. The word “monstrous” indicates that we must take one letter out of two of the rest of the index, starting with the first: StUfF oF mR wAuGh Is SeT. There are many “code words” or “indicators” that have special meaning in the cryptic context of crossword puzzles. (In the example above, “about,” “unfinished” and “ascendant” all fall into this category). Learning or recognizing them is a useful and necessary part to become a skilled cryptic crossword decryptor. It is less clear from the first principles whether, for an index composed of a certain number of letters, there is a difference between the positions within the target word that take those letters. If the lexicon were organized as the default dictionary, one would expect that knowledge of the first letter of a word would be more useful than knowing a single letter in another position, as this would distinguish a section of the lexicon in which the word sought would be from other sections where a search would be useless. It is clear that mental lexionics are not organized as dictionaries; However, I really think that most crossword puzzles would agree that knowing the first letter of a target word is generally more useful than knowing another letter of the word. This intuition is supported by a well-known study by Tversky and Kahneman (1973) in which people estimated for each of the consonants K, L, N, R and V if this was more common in the position of the first or third letter in English. A majority of participants felt that the frequency of the appearance in the position of the first letter for the majority of the letters was greater than that of the position of the third letter, although in each of these cases it is the opposite. Gigerenzer and Brighton (2009) argued that this subset of consonants was atypical, since most consonants are more likely to appear in the position of the first letter than in the position of the third, indicating that, from a broader perspective and in the absence of specific knowledge to the contrary, a consonant is more likely to take the first position of the letter than the third, which is statistically justified. The solution word or phrase and spoonerism are included, and the type of reference is almost always indicated by reference to Spooner himself – some regions/publications insisting on the inclusion of his religious title “Rev.” or “Reverend.” Unlike all other types of clues, it is almost impossible to hide them. But that doesn`t necessarily make them easy.
In principle, it should be possible to determine precisely how much information a given structural indication provides to a person with a complete knowledge of a specific lexicon (OED, his own). It requires nearly 18 bits to indicate a word in the 1991 209,500-word OED corpus. An index or series of indices that would reduce the number of potential targets to about 50 would provide about 12 bits of information.
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