Crosswords 100 Years Old

100 Years Old, but where did the Crossword Puzzle come from?

Tomorrow Saturday 21 December, 2013 the Crossword Puzzle, no doubt the most popular and widespread word game in the world will be 100 years old!!! But where did the Crossword Puzzle come from? Well as so nicely explained in the following Stuff of Genius video, the Crossword Puzzle was invented by English born Arthur Wynne. At the time Wynne was working for the New York World, a newspaper published in New York City, and was asked to come up with a "mental exercise" for the paper's Sunday Fun section. He came up with what he called a word cross puzzle and based it on a game from his childhood called "Magic Squares". As you can see from the video and sketch below, Wynne's word puzzle idea was diamond-shaped and without blackened-out squares. It was first published in the Christmas edition of the New York World on Sunday, 21 December, 1913.

The first crossword puzzle, created by Arthur Wynne,
published in the New York World on December 21, 1913
(Source: Wikimedia Commons).

Arthur Wynne's Crossword Puzzle Was A Big Success

Wynne's word game was very popular and immediately became a regular weekly feature in the World however the name was changed from Word-cross to Cross-word and was also changed from diamond-shaped to rectangular. In 1924 Dick Simon and Lincoln Schuster published a book on Wynne's crosswords which became a bestseller. Based on its popularity, other newspapers quickly took up Wynne's crossword idea and in the 1920s, crosswords were being published in most of the leading American newspapers, and also spread to other countries including England.

Guardian Crossword by rightee

The Cryptic Crossword

While Arthur Wynne's first Crossword Puzzle had relatively easy clues, in time, the they became much more difficult and from the mid-1920s they started becoming more cryptic including content like anagrams and wordplay. The English translator and poet, Edward Powys Mathers, who under the pseudonym "Torquemada" set crosswords for The Saturday Westminster and The Observer from the mid-1920s until his death, was the first setter to use cryptic clues exclusively and is often credited as being the inventor of the cryptic crossword.

Cryptic Crossword Puzzle (Source: Maggi Abrams)