Should I use (1,3) or (1-3) or (4)?

Question

I'm making a set of clues and I have a problem with this one:

Roentgen's letter

Should I use (1,3) or (1-3) or (4) for the enumeration?

What does this mean? Is this a puzzle or a question? There is a number 13 on the Roentgen's letter to Tesla. — Ardweaden, Aug 05 '19 at 11:30
Thanks. I read https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/45984/cryptic-clue-guide and now this makes sense. — Ardweaden, Aug 05 '19 at 12:11
Has a useful answer been given? If so, please don't forget to $\color{green}{\checkmark \small\text{Accept}}$ it :) — Rubio, Aug 08 '19 at 04:37

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 05 '19 at 11:56

7

First of all, we need the answer, which is:

X-Ray (discovered/ invented by Roentgen, and x-ray is a NATO letter)

According to Deusovi's Cryptic Clue Guide, enumeration should be equivalent of the answer. Therefore, the enumeration should be

1-3

answered Aug 05 '19 at 11:56

Omega Krypton

21,640
2
25
125

1

My dictionary contains both "X ray" and "X-ray". – Scratch---Cat Aug 05 '19 at 13:37
1

That is the problem. – Scratch---Cat Aug 05 '19 at 13:37
@Scratch---Cat To clarify, your post is a puzzle, right? If it's a question, then you need to edit it in order to indicate that it's a question and not a puzzle. – Tanner Swett Aug 05 '19 at 15:19
My guide definitely isn't universal, and I'm not an authority on cryptics. I think this one's regionally dependent, as sjb answered. I'd use (1-3), but I think I've seen people ignore hyphens too (so they'd just use (4)). – Deusovi Aug 05 '19 at 16:33
@TannerSwett Either type of posting here is perfectly fine, and there's no need to specifically call out that a question is actually a question vs a challenge puzzle. (People who don't understand the question as such are unlikely to be able to answer it, and might spend some fruitless minutes pondering what the puzzle might be, so out of consideration for them a comment might help - but it's certainly not something the poster "need" do at all. We have no such rule here.) – Rubio Aug 07 '19 at 00:41
@Rubio I'm sorry, you're right, I shouldn't have said that. I think what I should have said is that I found this post confusing because it's not clear whether it's intended as a question or as a puzzle, and the two types of posts seem to call for different answers. – Tanner Swett Aug 07 '19 at 00:45

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 05 '19 at 16:27

I think this is region dependent - see any number of Cracking the Cryptic links on youtube. Many crosswords in the US for instance would enumerate this as (4) as they don't break for words, whereas in the UK it's more likely to be (1,3) - (https://tony-sever.livejournal.com/394825.html)

Should I use (1,3) or (1-3) or (4)?

2 Answers2