I haven’t made a Decrypting the Cryptic post in a couple of years, but I’ve been doing enough question-mark clues on Instagram that I think it’s worth talking about them a bit, and how question marks in cryptics are the same and different from question marks in standard American crosswords.

If you’ve gotten to, say, Wednesday-level difficulty solving standard American puzzles with the New York Times or Los Angeles Times, you’ll have seen question-mark clues before. An example is [Focuses on the road?], which was used in a NYT mini puzzle in 2024. The question mark is there to indicate that you should not take the clue literally. The answer is FORD, because you’d probably read the clue literally to mean “pays attention, presumably while driving,” whereas the answer refers to the Focus, a car produced by Ford.

In cryptics, as in standard American crosswords, question marks are also there to indicate something not quite literal is going on. A major difference, though, is that because cryptic clues have two parts — a definition and wordplay, given in some order — the question mark in a cryptic clue most likely applies to either the definition or the wordplay, not the entire clue.

Here’s an example in which a question mark indicates that the wordplay isn’t literal: [Action star of “The Little Mermaid,” for example? (6)] The answer is SEAGAL: The definition is “action star,” of which Steven SEAGAL is a literal example. Split SEAGAL into two parts and you get SEA GAL, which you could say is defined by [The Little Mermaid, for example] (ignoring the quotation marks). But it’s a bit of a punny stretch, so I put the question mark there.

And here’s an example where I used a question mark to indicate that the definition isn’t literal: [People at first hurt a cagy, heartless drug dealer? (8)] for PHARMACY. The wordplay here is a little complicated, so let’s focus on the definition, which is [drug dealer?] Does a pharmacy deal in drugs, as in legal prescription and nonprescription medications? Sure. Is that usually what one thinks of when one sees the phrase “drug dealer”? No, so I added the question mark to give solvers a little help.

One thing that’ll help you use question marks to solve: In a well-constructed cryptic clue, the question mark should be adjacent to the portion of the clue that it applies to. So if you have a clue with the definition first, then the wordplay, and the definition is punny but the question mark is at the end, that’s not a well-constructed clue; an editor would ask the constructor to revise the clue so that the question mark and the non-literal clue material are adjacent.

Hope this is helpful! Do you have a question about cryptics that baffles you that you’d like me to answer (or at least talk about, if I don’t have the answers)? Comment on this post! You can also read older Decrypting the Cryptic posts, although you should know that I wrote most of them five years ago, when I was a way less experienced constructor. Which means the older clues, at least the ones I came up with myself, aren’t always perfect. One of these days I’ll get around to updating, if enough folks are interested!