Okay, so today I decided to dust off one of those Italian crossword books I have lying around. Been a while, needed to get the brain working in that direction again.
Everything was going okay, you know, filling in the easy ones, the short words, getting a few letters here and there. Then I hit this one clue, and it just kind of stumped me for a bit. The clue was basically asking for the Italian equivalent of the name “Paul”. Simple enough, right? Well…
Figuring out ‘Paul’
My first thought just went straight to how it sounds. Paul… Paolo? Yeah, that sounded right. It’s a pretty common name, you see it around. So, I grabbed my pencil, feeling pretty confident.
I counted the squares for the clue. Looked like five letters. P-A-O-L-O. Yep, fits perfectly. It crossed with a couple of other words I already had in. Let’s see… one was an ‘A’ as the second letter, and another was an ‘O’ as the fourth. PA–O-L-O. It matched up nicely with what I already had penciled in.
So, I went ahead and carefully wrote it in. P… A… O… L… O. Felt good seeing it fit. Sometimes the most obvious answer is the right one, but you still gotta double-check with the crossing letters, otherwise, you can mess up a whole section of the puzzle.
Checking the Crossings
- The word crossing at the ‘A’ seemed to work out once I put ‘Paolo’ in.
- Same for the word crossing the second ‘O’. The letters just clicked into place.
It wasn’t exactly rocket science, this particular clue, but it’s always satisfying when the letters line up and confirm your thinking. Just one more word down in the grid. Moving on to the next challenge now. Gotta keep practicing, right?
