letter bank

English

Noun

letter bank (plural letter banks)

  1. (crosswording) A type of cryptic device similar to an anagram, but in which fodder letters can be used more than once.
    • 2013 February 14, Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto, “Going to the Bank”, in The Nation‎[1]:
      One form of wordplay that’s proved both popular and fruitful in the National Puzzlers’ League—but has been used rarely if at all in cryptic crosswords—is the letter bank.
    • 2018 February 24, Caitlin Lovinger, New York Times‎[2]:
      If you started out with the northeast pair of “Revolutionary War heroes” at 28A and 13D, you could be really confused — NATHAN HALE and ETHAN ALLEN aren’t anagrams, but they’ve got the same number of letters in their names — and the same letters, which satisfies the rules of the letter bank game.
    • 2021 July 19, Alan Connor, “Crossword Council #4 – that’s not an anagram! It’s a letter bank …”, in The Guardian‎[3]:
      That said, there’s perhaps less scope for that worry in the “reverse” kind of letter-bank clue ... Flexible source of characters in Ecclesiastes (7) ... like this one for ELASTIC, yet I find I prefer those where the fodder is shorter than the answer.
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