Wow... and people criticise Microsoft for being slow to fix bugs in IE!
The discussion in that thread is way over my head, but I note one of them posted this link to some possible workarounds. Would it not be possible to use one of those in this instance?
Henry Hook is the all time king of US cryptics.
He has a series of 5 cryptics collections that he did a while back that is completely out of print but used copies of it surface online every now and then.
https://www.amazon.com/Henry-Hooks-Cryptic-Crosswords-Other/dp/0812927672
Get them if you can get them, they are astonishingly good, the best of the best of US cryptics. And my advice is photocopy them before you mark the books up, or just do them on the photocopied pages, because these things are extremely rare.
Since you're in r/crosswords, I'll assume you're looking for cryptic crosswords. I've used this one before. The puzzles are mostly accessible to beginners.
It's an app called Learn Cryptic Crosswords.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teazel.learn.cryptic.crosswords&hl=en_US
Hi - It's only one puzzle - but spread throughout the book. Size - just regular newspaper standard. This is a link to the book on Amazon - link to e-book If you go to 'look inside' you will see at the start of each chapter a clue - sometimes two - and at the end of the printed book there is a page where readers can fill in the crossword puzzle. In the e-book version there is a link to an online page where the answers can be filled in.
It's not too great - but it was the only way to do an interactive puzzle link to online crossword.
If you're still interested you can email me at
We have the best selection of high-quality, free online Crossword Solver . We've got games for people who are looking for something quick and gentle
clojure, and i'll include export to across-lite format, since there are already lots of tools to share across-lite puzzles on the web. there's some code up here but right now it's just a grid editor.
I used this to learn:
This one is on the easy side:
https://lovattspuzzles.com/online-puzzles-competitions/daily-cryptic-crossword/
The Guardian's Quitpics are good choice of real crosswords that you get through.
It's called Alphacross and it's free, although some of the crosswords require a paid subscription (I don't get those). There's a choice of 9 daily, 4 weekly and 1 biweekly that you can have pushed to your device.
It's pretty decent, granted that I have it installed on my tablet rather than my phone, so I can't speak to how usable it is on a tiny screen.
I'm loving this app on Android which was $6, and is I think a book basically turned into an app with interactive lessons. First level free. (no affiliation)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teazel.learn.cryptic.crosswords&hl=en
But when I go back to try the Guardian's cryptics, I feel lost, which is what made me think of making a small extension to point out the indicators.
Henry Howarth has written the best beginner book in my opinion. Very well structured, reads like a coursebook rather than just a list of clues and clue types
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0992738202/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_m8GgFbPC8XM67
The OED lists three spellings: >!uroboros, ouroboros and uroborus. So it seems you can have an 'u' there, but not while also having the 'o' at the start!<.
Chambers only has >!ouroboros!<.
That said, that spelling does have some use, like this book, for example.
EDIT: Here's what Google Ngram Viewer looks like. It seems >!the 'u' spellings are pretty uncommon!<.
Does anyone have any experience with this? I don't have an iPhone (though they seem to be working on an Android version), but it looks useful, even if just for the ability to scan in a crossword. I've tried using an Android app that does a similar thing, but it doesn't seem to work very well (Crossword Toolkit, see my comment there).
EDIT: clearly the title should say 'scan in crossword*s* to solve'.
Thank you so much for this! I went ahead and got this though for a start.
Thank you for these suggestions! I will certainly look into the book and the compiler you suggested. For a start i went ahead and got this