Letter banks are not quite unknown among the traditional cryptic clue types, but they’re right on the bubble. Lots of print and online resources forget them altogether. And they don’t show up too often in British puzzles, though they’re a bit more popular with American cryptic-makers like Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto. Not surprising, perhaps, since it’s the American Will Shortz who’s credited with discovering them. But what is a letter bank?
A letter bank and expansion are very much like anagrams, except that the letter bank only lists each letter once, and the expansion repeats those same letters more times to get something longer. ENS is a letter bank for the expansion “SEES SENSE,” and the letter bank LENS has the expansion “SENSELESSNESS.”
Not too tough to figure out. What’s tough is deciding just what makes a good letter bank. A few years ago, David Steinberg and Luci Bresette published a puzzle at the New York Times that featured several phrases whose letter banks were linked to them by theme:
U.S. CAPITOL… POLITICS AS USUAL
UNEARTHS… TREASURE HUNTER
GRAND TIME… GETTING MARRIED
MASTERING… TRAINING SEMINAR
The expanded phrases were at least 50% bigger than their letter banks. That seems like a good rule of thumb, but it depends—small words with common letters might need bigger expansions to mean anything. Turning LENS into SENSELESSNESS is pretty cool, but nobody’s going to be impressed by turning STAR into STARTS.
And since cryptic crosswords’ answers don’t have the constraint of theme links to their clue content, that’s all the more reason their letter games should be impressive…
“Bank
heist!” our motto in popular TV series (3,5,2,3,5)—THE TRUTH IS OUT THERESharp character of Austen’s
letters
(10)—ASTUTENESSI’m a
resource
for movie musical (5,3)—MAMMA MIA!
For fragments of the last two, I owe some inspiration to Eric Chaikin, whose own trove of letter bank finds is more than worth a link!
Tomorrow: a puzzle!