Meg

Loved today’s crossword - a fun Monday puzzle to start off the week! I always enjoy a theme based around word categorisation - palindromes, collocations, homonyms, heteronyms. Today’s answers seemed to flow through my fingers easily, and for the first time in a while I didn’t need the help from the above article which gave me a confidence boost after the rebuses in Sunday’s crossword! I’ve been doing the crossword for about two months now and I’ve started to notice certain words that come up in almost every puzzle. Some of them being Era / Eras, Eta / Etas, Area, Aloe, Ape, Açai - for me this is what’s making the crossword less enjoyable. I realise the commonality between these words is the short length and number of vowels which probably makes them easy to slot in between other answers, but I’d really like to stop seeing the same word over and over!

The first word I got where the hint was a hyphen was DEAR, and I thought maybe the theme was words that often precede a hyphen. Seemed a bit of a stretch since you’d usually write “Dear Mrs Soandso -” if you were going to use a hyphen in place of a comma. Once I got HOLD-DEAR, I realised what the hyphens were indicating for the theme and it helped figure out the others. I think a better way to have hinted at the theme would have been putting the word COLLOCATION in the middle, where the hint was something like “A predictable word to follow, or the theme to today’s puzzle”. So if you had BULLET, you’d think of words like POINT, CASING, or TRAIN.