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My way in was to look at 9A and make an intelligent guess about what might code to E. There is only one word which then fits the pattern of the other uncoded letter which appears multiple times.

But the title?

Looking for common letter combinations in clue answers may help too. I have two three-letter answers with the same last two and another pair of answers with the same first two letters.

dylan, 37a could be name of an actor?

This may be helpful.

Order of frequency of digraphs (two letter combinations):
th er on an re he in ed nd ha at en es of or nt ea ti to it st io le is ou ar as de rt ve

Hi cockie, re the title: "expand" co into the 2 letter replacements then encipher.

Quite a fun challenge - half crossword and half cryptography.

I too found 9a as the way in and there were surprisingly few entries (I only found 1) that would fit once you had a couple of different repeated letters.

I still have a couple of parsing queries and haven’t got one of the clue answers yet but have a completed grid!

So it's not the symbols for chemical elements, then, which is what I was working on. I am totally stumped by this - if letters have to be replaced by digraphs, how come the lengths of some answers don't change? And is there any logic to the replacements?

Sorry to be so thick - I like to think I'm quite good at crosswords, but I'm not much cop at coding, especially when the puzzle gives no help as to how to set about enciphering!

Can anyone supply a hint to 26A please - last clue to solve. I have no knowledge of hip-hop! No idea how to encode anything yet except 34A / 31D might give a hint to one substitution.

Sorry, 16A. D'oh.

I hope I'm not making things more complicated than they already seem to be. I notice that the clue solutions to 1Ac / 1Dn and 5Ac / 5Dn begin with the same letters, as they would in a normal crossword (B & L respectively). Can I assume that something similar occurs at the other initial letter juncture in cell 23?

Clue solutions which match the number of cells available in the grid, and therefore contain letters which encode to another single letter are
-6 AC
-34 AC
-5 DN
-15 DN
- 20 DN
- 25 DN

My initial move will be to write out the alphabet and mark all the letters included in the solutions of the above clues with a number 1.

The word "different" in the preamble is concerning me, but I'm hoping that everywhere else in the grid where my (marked with 1) letters may occur, will also be filled with the same single encoded letter.


I will then move on to looking at letter patterns in the cold solved clues I have . Is this a method?