The Puzzle That Started as a Word-Cross
On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, a journalist born in Liverpool, published a "word-cross" puzzle in the New York World. It had most of the features of a modern crossword, and it is often called the first one. An illustrator later flipped the name around to "cross-word".
The idea did not come from nowhere. The phrase "cross word puzzle" was first printed in 1862 in the US magazine Our Young Folks. In 1890, an Italian magazine ran a small four-by-four grid by Giuseppe Airoldi called "To pass the time". It had no shaded squares, but it did have clues across and down. In 19th-century England, simple versions grew out of the word square, a set of words that read the same across and down.
Wynne's puzzle became a weekly feature and soon spread to other papers. The Pittsburgh Press was running them by 1916, and The Boston Globe by 1917.
The Craze Everyone Said Would End
By the early 1920s, crosswords were everywhere. In 1922, the New York Public Library complained that puzzle fans were swarming the dictionaries and encyclopedias, driving away readers who needed them for work.
In 1924, Simon & Schuster published the first book of crosswords, after a suggestion from co-founder Richard Simon's aunt. The publisher doubted it would sell and printed only a small run. The book came with a pencil attached, and it was an instant hit. Crosswords became the craze of 1924.
Not everyone was charmed. A 1924 New York Times editorial called puzzle solving "a primitive form of mental exercise". In 1925 the paper said the craze was "dying out fast", and in 1929 it declared the crossword had "gone the way of all fads". Yet the Times started its own crossword on 15 February 1942, hoping it could offer a welcome break from the hard news of World War II.
Clues That Mislead on Purpose
Britain added its own twist in the mid-1920s: the cryptic crossword. Edward Powys Mathers made the first puzzle with fully cryptic clues, just for his friends. One friend sent it to a newspaper without asking him. The editors liked it and asked Mathers for more.
In a cryptic, each clue is a small puzzle of its own. It holds a plain definition at the start or end, plus wordplay that builds the same answer another way. A good clue should be fair and exact, yet deliberately misleading.
Take "A few, we hear, add up (3)". "Add up" is the definition, and "we hear" signals a homophone: a few is "some", which sounds like SUM. Or "Cat's tongue (7)", which is PERSIAN, both a type of cat and a language. One of the sneakiest is "Senselessness", solved by the letter E: take "ness" away from "sense" and E is all that is left.
66,666 Puzzles and a 58-Letter Answer
According to Guinness World Records, the most prolific crossword maker is Roger Squires of Ironbridge, Shropshire. On May 14, 2007, he published his 66,666th crossword, equal to about 2 million clues. He is one of only four setters to have made cryptic puzzles for The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the Financial Times and The Independent.
Squires also holds the record for the longest word ever used in a published crossword. It was the 58-letter name of a Welsh town, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, and he clued it as an anagram.
Fans track other records too. In 2013, Joe Krozel made a New York Times weekday-size puzzle with just 50 words, the lowest count ever. In 2012 he also set the record for the fewest black squares in a 15x15 American grid: only 17, leaving 208 white ones. In the Times, puzzles get harder through the week, so solvers call a really tough one a "Saturday".
Two Right Answers and a Wartime Scare
Some grids have more than one correct solution. These are called Schrodinger or quantum puzzles, after a famous thought experiment in quantum physics. At least ten have appeared in The New York Times since the late 1980s.
The best known ran on November 5, 1996, the day of the US presidential election. One clue read "Lead story in tomorrow's newspaper", and the answer next to it was ELECTED. The first answer could be either candidate's name, and every crossing word worked both ways too.
Crosswords once caused real alarm. In 1944, Allied security officers were worried when a series of puzzles in The Daily Telegraph contained words that were secret code names for operations planned as part of Operation Overlord. And some code breakers at Bletchley Park were picked after doing well in a crossword-solving contest. Today, a person who makes or solves crosswords is called a cruciverbalist.
