Surname clues are the ones players learn to love. They cut deep, they need no counting, and you can answer them from across the room once you know what to look for.
Is the surname a trade?
Some surnames are simply the name of a job. In the Dutch cast those are names like Bakker, Visser, Mulder, Molenaar, Timmerman, Schipper and Kok; in the English cast Baker, Miller, Fisher, Smith, Carpenter, Cook, Mason and Weaver.
The list is deliberately conservative. Every name on it is one a player recognises as work without needing to look it up, because a clue you could argue about is a clue that cannot be used.
Does the surname have a particle?
A particle is the small word in front of a Dutch surname: van, de, van der, ter, op den. The clue is answered by a very simple test — does the surname contain a space? Van Dijk and De Boer do; Jansen and Hoekstra do not.
This clue is often the sharpest opener in a Dutch grid, because roughly a third of the surname pool carries a particle. One read of the second half of every card and a third of the grid is gone.
Does the name carry a special character?
This one covers accents, hyphens and apostrophes anywhere in the full name: Öztürk, Yılmaz, Owusu-Ansah, D'Amico, García. It is the only clue where an accent matters — every other clue folds it away.
It is also the clue most likely to reward a slow look. A cedilla or a tilde is easy to skim past at small sizes, so scan the cards rather than the names.
The surname clues you might mistake for these
Two other clue types mention the surname but are really letter or counting clues in disguise:
- The surname starts with X — a letter clue applied to the second half.
- The surname is longer than the first name — a counting clue, and one where a particle changes the answer.
Keep them separate in your head. The three features on this page can be answered by recognition; those two cannot.
Where these surname features come from
The features a clue can test are not invented for the game; they are real properties of how European surnames were formed. Occupational names — Bakker, Smit, Miller, Fisher — come from what an ancestor did, and they cluster so heavily that a clue about them can cut a grid in half.
The particles are a Dutch and Flemish speciality. A tussenvoegsel such as van, de or van der is part of the name but not part of the alphabetised entry, which is exactly why a clue about it feels slippery to non-Dutch players and obvious to Dutch ones.
The generator draws from separate pools per language so both name worlds stay plausible rather than blended. How those pools are built, and why that matters for fairness, is in names and fair play.
Related reading
- How to read letter clues quickly and correctly — What counts as a letter, what the puzzle ignores, and the scanning habits that make clues about first letters, missing letters and endings almost instant.
- Where the names come from — Thousands of generated names drawn as matched pairs, why naming traditions are a property of a name and never a claim about a person, and why the grid is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible.
- 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.
- Detective games that make you do the deducing — Seven detective games that hand you evidence instead of a waypoint — Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, Her Story and more — plus what each one asks of you and how long it takes.