Letter clues look like the easy ones, and they are — right up to the moment a capital I is mistaken for a lower-case L, or someone counts the middle initial. Here is exactly how a name is read.
What the puzzle sees
Before any letter clue is applied, a name is reduced to plain letters: the first name and the surname joined together, accents folded to their base letter, and everything else dropped. So Öztürk is read as ozturk, Owusu-Ansah as owusuansah, and Sanne M. Visser as sannevisser.
- The middle initial is not part of the name for letter clues. It has its own clue type.
- Spaces, hyphens and apostrophes are not letters.
- Accents never change which letter something is — only the separate special-character clue cares about them.
- Capitalisation is irrelevant.
The four shapes a letter clue takes
- Starts with X — the first letter of the first name. The fastest clue in the game to apply: you can scan a column of fifty names on the first character alone.
- Has no X anywhere — the whole name, both parts. Slower, because a miss anywhere disqualifies. Scan for the shape of the letter rather than reading the name.
- Does not end in X — the final letter of the surname. Read the right-hand edge of each card.
- The surname starts with X — one letter again, but on the second part.
Scanning tricks that actually help
For starts with clues, do not read names at all. Let your eye run down the first character of each card and stop only when the shape matches. For has no X clues, hunt for the letter's silhouette — a tall stroke, a descender, a round bowl — rather than sounding out each name.
Work in columns, not rows. The grid is laid out five to a row, and a column of first letters is a much cleaner visual line than a row of full names.
The site sets names in Atkinson Hyperlegible for exactly this reason. In most typefaces a capital I and a lower-case l are the same stroke, which makes “no L in the name” unanswerable. See names and fair play.
The traps
Three mistakes account for nearly every wrong crossing on a letter clue:
- Counting the middle initial. A grid full of names with a middle T tempts you to read it as part of the name. It is not.
- Stopping at the first name. A clue about a missing letter applies to the surname too, and the surname is where the letter usually hides.
- Reading an accented letter as a different one. Ü is a U. Ç is a C. The accent matters only for the special-character clue.
When a letter clue is the wrong opener
A starts with clue on a grid where a quarter of the names begin with the same letter is a weak cut, however fast it is. Glance at the first column before committing: if the letters look evenly spread, the clue is sharp; if the grid is full of one letter, save it and open with something else. Clue order covers the trade-off.
Related reading
- How to handle the clues you have to count — Vowel counts, doubled letters, name lengths and comparisons between the two halves of a name. Why they are the hardest clues to apply and how to make them reliable.
- What a surname can tell you at a glance — Three clue types read the surname as an object rather than as letters: whether it is a trade, whether it has a particle, and whether it carries a special character.
- The order you apply clues in changes everything — Clues are numbered for reference, not for sequence. How to spot the clue that halves the field, and why applying the same clues in a different order can nearly double your work.