Cryptic crosswords for beginners: the Nato alphabet

This helpful series – for those tempted to solve cryptics, but perhaps a little afraid – has pointed you at various interesting lists. The periodic table, those IVR letters that show what country a car is from, Roman numerals and so on. Here’s another: the phonetic alphabet. If you’ve been a sea scout, those 26 codewords might come to mind readily; for the rest of us, it’s a matter of recalling other places they have been used, such as the cop series Juliet Bravo, or the impolite imprecation to Foxtrot Oscar.

In the example clues that follow, remember that cryptics generally give you two routes to the answer: a definition of what it actually means (indicated in bold type), before or after a little recipe for the letters that spell it out (in italics).

Some examples

The phonetic alphabet is a gift to cryptic setters, whose entire existence is devoted to finding different words to represent the letters that make up an answer (in that wordplay half of the clue). It can also be handy for solvers.

Because the phonetic alphabet needs to be understandable whichever languages you speak, the choice of words becomes limited to those that tend to be pronounced the same way, whatever your mother tongue. Frankly, some of them are odd. FOXTROT, for example, is a word rarely heard – even on Strictly Come Dancing, there were only five in the last series, as compared with 15 performances of its cousin the quickstep – and so it’s a dead giveaway in a cryptic clue:

Here, you put out of your mind the image suggested by the literal meaning of the clue of a showdown with Craig Revel Horwood; you instead add an F (“foxtrot”) to a word for “expert” that makes up the remaining three letters (ACE), for an answer that is confirmed by the definition “confront”. (That clue, incidentally, is by Exit and comes from a puzzle for an event held by Fifteen Squared, a solvers’ blog that is invaluable if you’re getting to grips with cryptics from the Guardian as well as various other papers.)

The same goes for the little-sighted word YANKEE. Here’s Crucible:

So after the Y (“Yankee”) we have ON (indicated as directly as possible, by “on”) and a spot of GCSE modern languages (see our previous guide) turns “the German” into DER: YONDER, or “over there”.

It’s not always that simple

Other entries from the phonetic alphabet hide themselves better, especially the men’s names. So when Chifonie gives us ...

... we get distracted by thinking of Mike and his kind gesture to Goya or Miró or whoever before seeing that we add M (“Mike”) to an anagram (“arranged”) of SIESTA for the artist MATISSE. Likewise, from the same setter, Charlie ...

... where C plus AROUSES equals CAROUSES.

And setters, being predisposed to playing games and to not meaning what they mean to say, sometimes take things a little further. So when Orlando gives this clue ...

... we need to look for the codeword that precedes Papa in the phonetic alphabet, confirmed because OSCAR is also the nickname of the Academy Awards. So, using the same principle, in the light of one of the clues above, with the aid of the bold definition and italicised wordplay, and referring if necessary to the full alphabet below, the beginner should have no trouble with this clue by Crucible ...

... and if not, the answer is at the bottom.

Over to you

Here’s the full list, as it appears in the Oxford Dictionary of Travel and Tourism:

Beginners: any questions? And seasoned solvers, any experiences or favourite examples to share?

The answer to Crucible’s clue is FOXTROT. The rest of our For Beginners posts are available here and the Guardian’s weekly quiptic puzzle is designed as a stepping-stone for those who want to make the leap from the cryptic.