Where did the Crossword Puzzle Come From?

The Crossword Puzzle is probably the most well known and enjoyed word puzzle in the world. How did we get the crossword puzzle?

Surprisingly the crossword puzzle has a short history, although the root of the word square goes back centuries to the first word square which was found in Pompeii. The Latin translation of this game was ‘magic square’. The first crossword puzzle was created in England in the nineteenth century, and was patterned after the ancient word square. It was invented by Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool Journalist.

Arthur Wynne had immigrated to New York and was working for the New York World Newspaper His editor asked him to invent a new game for the newspaper’s Sunday “Fun” section. Wynne recalled a puzzle from his childhood called “Magic Squares,” in which a given group of words had to be arranged so their letters would read the same way across and down. Wynne created a larger and more complex grid, and provided clues instead of giving the necessary words. The first crossword was published in the New York World newspaper on December 21, 1913.

The first crosswords looked very different from the ones we are familiar with today. Arthur Wynne’s crossword was called word-cross, was diamond shaped, and had no black squares.

The word-cross puzzle became a weekly feature in the New York World. Four weeks after the puzzle first appeared, typesetters at the newspaper inadvertently transposed the words in the title to read “Cross-Word.” For some reason, the name stuck – and so did the puzzle. When the World tried to drop it a few months later, readers were so hostile that the paper reversed itself and decided to make it a permanent feature of the puzzle page instead. From that time the  name evolved into the crossword , losing the hyphen.

How did Crossword Puzzles Become So Popular?

The first book of crosswords was published in 1924 by a small publishing company called Simon and Schuster. The first crossword book contained a collection of some of the crossword puzzles that had been in the World newspaper. As a result of that first book publication, both Simon and Schuster and crossword puzzles became extremely successful. The book, which came with a pencil attached, became a best seller, and crosswords became the most popular game. The crossword  still remains the most popular word puzzle game