Minute Cryptic 2026-05-22: Midrange van clue

The surface is a decoy

This clue is built to sound like a minor traffic mishap: a midrange van meeting a circular intersection. That image is doing a lot of camouflage work. The question mark is the giveaway that the clue is not meant to be read literally. Instead, it nudges you toward a more playful, cryptic interpretation.

The trick is to separate the story from the instruction. The story is the van crashing into something round. The instruction is hidden in the word crashed, which is doing the heavy lifting as an anagram indicator.

Spot the cryptic machinery

1. Find the definition

The definition is at the end: circular intersection? In cryptic crossword land, a question mark often signals a looser, lateral definition. Here, “circular intersection” points toward a familiar visual idea rather than a standard dictionary phrase.

2. Identify the indicator

Crashed tells you the letters are going to be rearranged. That is classic anagram language. When something has crashed, it is no longer neatly ordered, so the clue is inviting you to scramble the fodder.

3. Gather the fodder

The fodder is Midrange van. Strip it down to its letters and you have the raw material for the solution. The phrase looks like a description of a vehicle, but cryptically it is just a letter bank waiting to be reshaped.

Why the indicator matters

The logic is precise: when a clue says something has crashed, you should expect the letters nearby to be disturbed. The word into can read as part of the surface story, but in the cryptic reading it mainly helps the sentence flow. The real instruction is that the fodder gets smashed together and rearranged until it fits the definition.

Once you treat Midrange van as an anagram set, the answer emerges cleanly. The final result matches the idea of a circular intersection, which is exactly the kind of visual, slightly indirect definition that cryptic clues love.

The “Aha!” moment

The breakthrough comes when the clue stops being about a van and starts being about letter movement. That shift is the whole game: the surface tells one story, but the cryptic grammar tells another. Here, crashed is the secret code word that unlocks the rearrangement, and the ending gives you the geometric target.

Once you see that, the clue stops feeling slippery and starts feeling inevitable.