Cryptic crosswords are designed to tease. The setters rarely mean precisely what they say, yet they always say precisely what they mean. Divining what they actually do mean is the challenge that taunts the solver. It's not always a pretty sight.

It irked P.G. Wodehouse to learn that the Provost of Eton would time his lightly boiled breakfast egg by the time it took him to solve The Times crossword. But isn't that what we all manage to do? Even those of us who, through necessity, might have to cultivate a taste for breakfasting on boiled eggs with the texture of toffee?

As readers attempting the first qualifying grid in this year's Times crossword competition already know, a crossword clue is a lexical sleight of hand. As with a magician, the setter seeks to misdirect you. He will indicate that the answer includes a flower, hoping to steer you towards the word rose or bloom, when the flower you need is Severn or Seine. A “number” could be a million or morphine. He will toss you an anagram, but disguise his instruction with phrases such as “turns out” or “muddles”. He will sneak in homophones: week and weak; night for knight.

To add spice, all setters have their own clue-making style. Like bowlers in cricket, they're all aiming for your wicket, but they propel the ball towards your stumps in slightly different ways.

If the frustration of that final uncracked clue leaves you weeping, you won't be the first to suffer. Acrostics feature in mosaics in Roman villas. The modern crossword, brought to Britain from America, was dismissed by this newspaper as a craze “making devastating inroads on the waking hours of every rank of society” until, in 1930, we began publishing our own. It proved a hit.