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Thanks granama1, I'll try to piece that together. I was already suspecting the axes and old word for march as in trek, the month being capitalised. Then try to see the thematic central-ish letter....

I got my grid so messed up that I ended up colouring in the 9 worlds in different colours and there were so many alterations with the result that I now can't distinguish which were the silver cells - I know it doesn't matter - I've completed the puzzle - but it annoys me not to finish - I think I can see DYRGT but the rest are obliterated - can anyone help please? It was quite a slog but then suddenly fell into place.

The first four letters of your five are correct, and, reordered, are the first four letters of the word to be written underneath

Thank you for your help!

I had thought of this - but thought it hd 2 "g"s - thanks again!

I too grew up with the two G spelling, funnily enough, so I was mildly surprised to see the variant!

Thanks to Arcadia for an ingenious and intricate construction. I struggled with the Worlds clues but there was just enough in the grid from the across and down clues to back solve a lot of the (to me) obscurer stuff in the Worlds.

The preamble refers to eight different letters so I think this means a letter can be used twice, which allows for the double G. I'm nowhere near finishing this but thanks to all for the hints!

Is the 3 letter unclued down entry on the left side of the grid an abbreviation ? I ask because the preamble does not confirm, as is usually the case. Perhaps there was not enough room in it to accommodate a sentence to that effect (or perhaps one is to interpret it as a name from the sporting world of the last century ?) !

I thought 'giants being only human, but this perhaps' was to say the least a convoluted definition and had not previously come across 'trip' as a way. Also, I am struggling to understand buddy at #7, given the e and m in the shorter word in the southernmost World are checked by the reversals and once account is taken of its longer word there is only one option to complete each of the unclued entries (although the result means having to simply reverse a word in the clue, which is rather unsatisfactory to the extent I would be happy to confess to flawed reasoning !)