Dictionary
Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.
letter bank en · NOUN
Meanings
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(qualifier:crosswording) A type of cryptic device similar to an anagram, but in which fodder letters can be used more than once.
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.
2021 July 19, Alan Connor, “Crossword Council #4 – that’s not an anagram! It’s a letter bank …”, in The Guardian: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.
2013 February 14, Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto, “Going to the Bank”, in The Nation: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.
2018 February 24, Caitlin Lovinger, New York Times:
Forms