Today’s cruciverbalists (people who play crossword puzzles) might prefer a smartphone version over filling in the boxes on paper, but the origin of these word puzzles is found in the newspaper. A version of crossword puzzles appeared in England during the 19th century, but they were simple games targeted at children. Most likely a development of existing word squares — groups of words arranged so the letters read the same vertically and horizontally — they were mainly printed in children’s puzzle books.
Crossword puzzles as we know them today were a later invention, widely credited to Arthur Wynne, a journalist at the long-defunct New York World newspaper. In 1913, Wynne was managing the “Fun” section of the paper’s Sunday edition and needed something new for the Christmas issue. Perhaps inspired by memories of word puzzles he’d solved back in England, Wynne created what he called a “Word-Cross Puzzle.”
His puzzle used a diamond-shaped grid with a hollow center and the letters F-U-N already filled in. Unlike modern crosswords, Wynne’s original puzzle had no black squares to separate words. The clues were mostly of average difficulty — for example, “A day dream” (“reverie”) and “To govern” (“rule”). Others required quite specialized knowledge: “An aromatic plant” (“nard”) and “The fibre of the gomuti palm” (“doh”).
Wynne’s first puzzle was published on December 21, 1913, and the feature soon became hugely popular with readers. A few weeks after that initial publication, an illustrator accidentally changed “Word-Cross” to “Cross-Word,” and the name stuck permanently. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the spelling “crossword” was in use by the 1920s. By that time, readers were clamoring for the word puzzles, and when Simon & Schuster printed The Crossword Puzzle Book in 1924, it became an immediate bestseller. It wasn’t long before almost every newspaper in the United States and Great Britain contained some kind of crossword.
As for Wynne, he tried to patent the puzzle, but the editors at the New York World refused to pay the associated costs. His only consolation, perhaps, is his legacy: He created one of the world’s most popular pastimes.
More from our network
Word Smarts is part of Inbox Studio, which publishes content that uplifts, informs, and inspires.
