Word Salad | The Nation

Anagrams are among the main tools in the hands of the cryptic crossword constructor (see our previous post), but there are other ways of mixing and recombining letters than the strict one-to-one style of the anagram. One form of wordplay that’s proved both popular and fruitful in the National Puzzlers’ League—but has been used rarely if at all in cryptic crosswords—is the letter bank.

A letter bank consists of at least two words or phrases. The shortest one, called the bank, contains no repeated letters (an “isogram,” in wordplay terminology), and any longer words or phrases are built by using each of those letters at least once, but repeating them as many times as necessary. So for instance, the four letters in the bank LENS can be repeated and recombined to form the longer word SENSELESSNESS. Other examples are CONQUEST and SONNET SEQUENCE, or the tripartite NASTIER/ARTSINESS/EASTERN RITES. In line with NPL guidelines, we require the longer word to be at least three letters longer than the bank (otherwise the result feels more like a failed anagram).

We have used only a handful of letter bank clues in the Nation puzzle. When we started drafting this post, we thought that the reason was because letter bank pairs are not all that common: The longer word needs to have enough repeating letters, and once the repeats are eliminated the distinct letters need to anagram to something useful.