Who would steal a crossword clue?  You can imagine it as the motive in a lost Inspector Morse yarn: a don with a sideline in setting who pinches another’s pithy anagram, a crime only discovered when his corpse is spotted bobbing under Magdalen bridge.  In real life? Those who compile crosswords do so for love – it’s decidedly not for the money – and nothing can stop them endlessly rearranging the English language into teasing puzzles.  The American crossword world, though, is facing up to what looks like a kind of clue-theft, not of the odd 12 across, but on an industrial scale, going back at least a decade.  Americans have never taken to the cryptic, and so there’s an impression here that their crosswords are simple fare: elementary definitions that will soon and as well be generated by some machine.  In fact, the best-loved American puzzles are constructed around themed answers, clued with precisely the allusive wit for which you need a human – or another human to copy from.  Universal Uclick is a syndicate that provides puzzles for hundreds of publications, and a startling number bear similarities to hand-crafted puzzles that have previously appeared elsewhere. The data-crunchers at FiveThirtyEight – Nate Silver’s site which famously called all 50 states correctly in the last US election – suggest that there are over 1,500 puzzles with at least a 75% overlap with someone else’s. Oops.  What’s especially upsetting American solvers is that many of the themed answers had originally appeared in the New York Times, the gold standard for original and honest clueing.  The paper’s national-treasure puzzle editor Will Shortz reckons the numbers make it “clear it’s plagiarism”; Universal Uclick has not officially commented, though the man in charge of their puzzles offered: “To me, it’s just mere coincidence”.  Referring to 65 alleged similarities with New York Times puzzles, he said: “Out of 15,000, I’m not surprised at all. I would expect it to be a couple of hundred.”  Until recently, puzzling plagiarism would have been easier. As newsprint found its way to the dumpster, so too would have any evidence. But the databases of clues assembled by devoted crossword fans and some clever code have made it possible to pull a Morse on anyone who might be cribbing crosswords. After all, these are people who are used to cracking clues.  The odd theft has been uncovered before – in India, and on very rare occasions over here. But British setters tend to work across the few papers that publish cryptics; no hi-tech forensics should be necessary to uncover any skulduggery in our smaller crosswording world. The Guardian’s Arachne told me that some solvers “can quote clues from years ago with eye-popping accuracy”, adding: “some setters, by contrast, can’t remember the clues they wrote last week, ahem”.  Besides, what a joyless crime it would be to copy and paste the ingenious work of another, then hastily tinker with a couple of clues to cover your tracks. The magic of crosswords comes from finding new ways of looking at very old words: if you take this on as your job, your task is, through perspiration as well as inspiration, to create something from nothing.  For the avoidance of doubt, the Clueing Coincidence feature that appears at this blog has never been meant to suggest anything other than the greater appeal that some words have to setters! The winners of the BOJO clueing competition will appear next week and I can be contacted at @alanconnor.
Hundreds of American crosswords appear to have been stolen. But who would steal a puzzle, and could it happen here?