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There is a strong evolutionary pressure for prey animals to avoid predators through camouflage, and for predators to be able to detect camouflaged prey. There can be a self-perpetuating coevolution, in the shape of an evolutionary arms race, between the perceptive abilities of animals attempting to detect the cryptic animal and the cryptic characteristics of the hiding species.
The straight or definition. This is in essence the same as any non-cryptic crossword clue: a synonym for the answer. It usually exactly matches the part of speech, tense, and number of the answer, and usually appears at the start or end of a clue. The cryptic, subsidiary indication or wordplay. This gives the solver some instructions on how to ...
Cryptic may refer to: In science: Cryptic species complex, a group of species that are very difficult to distinguish from one another; Crypsis, the ability of animals to blend in to avoid observation; Cryptic era, earliest period of the Earth; In music: Cryptic, by Edge of Sanity; Cryptic, a Minnesota-based music group formed by Brownmark
Cryptic crosswords often use abbreviations to clue individual letters or short fragments of the overall solution. These include: Any conventional abbreviations found in a standard dictionary, such as: "current": AC (for "alternating current"); less commonly, DC (for "direct current"); or even I (the symbol used in physics and electronics)
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.
A good cryptic clue should provide a fair and exact definition of the answer, while at the same time being deliberately misleading. Another type of wordplay used in cryptics is the use of homophones. For example, the clue "A few, we hear, add up (3)" is the clue for SUM. The straight definition is "add up", meaning "totalize".
synonym: 1: a word equivalent in meaning or nearly so to another word; a word that may be substituted for another word that has the same or a similar meaning, such as near and close (compare "antonym"). 2: In Biology, one or more names given to the same taxon, and so considered equivalent.
Cryptic crossword puzzles frequently use anagrammatic clues, usually indicating that they are anagrams by the inclusion of a descriptive term like "confused" or "in disarray". An example would be Businessman burst into tears (9 letters) .