Crossword

When you hear the word crossword the first thing that comes to your mind
is a conventional grid based game that was at some point a weekly
weekend ritual for you, and probably not a competitive event that can be
equally fun and rewarding.

Standard tech crosswords give the beloved grid based format of traditional
crosswords an interesting twist in the sense that you are not just
competing against time but against other competitors, with the objective
to win, and of course in the process, have fun.

What makes crosswords fun?

The key highlight of this event is that it requires absolutely no prior

preparation and very little effort, in exchange for a great deal of satisfaction
and fun. In contrast to traditional crosswords, tech crosswords do not
require a great deal of general knowledge pertaining to the world of
technology, and are usually based on common terms, including but not
limited to companies, products, games, iconic figures, etc that most people
have inevitably heard of at some point in their lives, and this is actually
what drives people to attend crosswords.

The event in itself ultimately boils down to your ability to decipher and
break down clues and connect them to a final answer, and is almost always
a fairly intuitive procedure. We will now try to make you understand and
hopefully help you get acquainted with what a typical tech crossword is
like.

Examples
Broadly speaking the clues are clever puns, testing your intuition as well as
skills with wordplay, and often require you to think in a multi-dimensional
manner instead of a strictly linear direction of thought, which is best
illustrated with examples such as the following-

1. A washerman(5)
Ans: ADOBE

The most common type of pun you’ll find in a crossword would revolve
around translating the clue, or perhaps a part of the clue to Hindi, and
relate it to the world of technology, as in the example given above.
Washerman as we all know, translates to the word “dhobi”, concatenating
“a” and “dhobi” you get the well known software giant Adobe.

2. Knowledge of the 14th alphabet454. (6)

Ans:NVIDIA

This example builds on the theme of translations that you would most
certainly encounter in any crossword. The approach to this clue is very
similar to the last one. It is rather obvious that The 14th alphabet i.e ‘N’ is
bound to form a part of the answer. As for the other part of the clue, that is
the word “knowledge”, which translates to “vidya”. Combining ‘N’ and
‘Vidya’ one gets the company Nvidia well known for its presence in the
world of gaming hardware.

3.Call Alan to the treasure spot(5)

Ans:ALEXA

While translations form a large part of crosswords, many clues are not
simply about translations as we saw in the previous example. Some clues
often need you to look out for proper nouns that are given, these keywords
or their truncatations often form a part of the final answer. In this example
the name “Alan” distinctly stands out indicating that it is directly related to
the answer. The other key phrase that we find here is “Treasure Spot” which
inclines us to think about the concept of treasure spots and where they’re
usually located. It is reasonable to say that it is common knowledge that
treasure spots are denoted by an ‘X’ in treasure maps. This leaves us with
three separate links, the letter ‘X’,the name ‘Alan’ and ‘call’. Now if I were to
call a certain Alan to the treasure spot marked with the letter X, I would
casually say “Alan X aa”, and we all know that Al is a common nickname for
Alan, giving us the answer “Al X aa” or “Alexa”.

4. How Thanos uses an ATM(8)

Ans: SNAPCASH
Many clues also involve pop culture references, which all of can relate to in
today’s day and age, ranging from movies,memes,music and the likes, as in
the example given above. The first thing that comes to our mind when we
think of the character Thanos, is his infamous ‘snap’ which wiped out half
the population in the movie avengers. Now we have the mighty thanos
using a commonplace commodity like an ATM, which is used for the
purpose of withdrawing ‘cash’. Needless to say there is only one possible
way to proceed that is combining the two links we have obtained i.e snap
and cash leading us to the answer Snapcash, which was a money transfer
service introduced by Snapchat.

5. Zlatan ko bula(7)
Ans: CALIBRI

Some clues may require you to identify iconic global personalities cutting
across fields by either their full names or just one half of their names.
Zlatan, here refers to the famous Swedish Footballer Zlaan Ibrahimovic. It is
obvious that the whole name Ibrahimovic cannot fit into the answer
because the answer comprises just 7 letters, so one is probably required to
think of truncations of his name. The other part, being in hindi is a direct
indication that it requires us to translate the verb ‘bula’ into English, giving
us two links “Call” and a truncation of the name ‘Ibrahimovic’. On playing
around with the words, it is not long before you’ll arrive at the answer
“Calibri”, which is a pretty well-known font.

To sum up there are a few steps that one should keep in mind while
approaching a crossword clue, namely

1. Translate the whole clue or a part of the clue

2. Identify keywords and proper nouns given in the clue and try to fit them
into the answer

3. If you are given the name of some iconic personality who is seemingly
unrelated to the world of technology, try to think of things commonly
associated with the person and try to fit them in with the other parts of the
clue.

4. If you’re stuck, your best bet is to break down the clue into smaller parts
and repeat steps 1 and 2, if possible, till you arrive at what you feel is a
reasonable guess.

This being said, if you are excited by the idea of crosswords and want to
participate in competitive crosswords, feel free to reach out to us and we’ll
give you more crosswords to practice as a fun pastime :)