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Sometimes you may be asked to delete one or more letters in a clue, using an indicator such as without or losing. It may be a particular letter or group of letters to be removed:

“Take a pulse and bemoan the absence of a doctor” = BEAN

(Absence is your indicator for a deletion. Delete the “MO” – a Medical Officer, or doctor – from BEMOAN to get BEAN, a pulse.)

You may be told not which letter or letters to remove, but where to remove them from – the beginning, the middle or the end. Let’s look at these three types.

FROM THE BEGINNING: Indicators include first off, don’t start, beheaded, headless, leaderless, unopened.

• “Decapitate pigs and quaff the resulting liquor”

(Yes, I know, it’s revolting, isn’t it? But pigs are swine; decapitate them to get WINE!)

FROM THE MIDDLE: Indicated by, for example, heartless, losing heart, empty, gutless. Often used to clue awkward two-letter groups; for instance a heartless man is MN, a heartless dog gives you DG, and . . .

• “Tree grows from an empty bottle” = BOLE

(Removing the middle of BOTTLE, TT, leaves it empty, and results in BOLE, the trunk of a tree.)

FROM THE END: Look out for endless, unfinished, almost, mostly, tailless, incomplete, last off.

• “Unfinished book can give you quite a shock”

(Simply delete the last letter of BOOK to give you BOO.)

Of course, all of these may be used for elements of a clue, as well as for the whole clue.

Remember No.3, Bridges and Burials? A word-in-word can also feature as a deletion. We looked at the word “denoted” and saw that it is NOT buried in DEED – DE(NOT)ED. But consider this:

• “Heartlessly denoted an act” = DEED

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