The history of the crossword

21 December 1913

The crossword has a precise birthday. On 21 December 1913, the New York World published a diamond-shaped puzzle called "Word-Cross", devised by a Liverpool-born journalist named Arthur Wynne to fill space in the Sunday "Fun" supplement.

Wynne did not invent word squares — those are Victorian and older — but he combined them with numbered clues and a printed grid, and that combination is the crossword. A typesetter's error soon reversed the title to "Cross-Word", and the name stuck.

For a decade it was a curiosity confined to one newspaper. Then in 1924 the new publishing house of Simon & Schuster brought out a collection of them — nervously, under a different imprint, in case it flopped. It did not. The book was a bestseller, and 1924–25 produced a genuine craze: crossword-themed songs, crossword dresses, complaints about lost productivity, and libraries rationing dictionary access.

Britain takes a different turn

British newspapers adopted the crossword quickly and then changed it. Where American puzzles kept definitions and dense grids, British setters developed the cryptic clue: a clue containing two indications of the answer — a straight definition at one end, and wordplay covering exactly the same letters.

The early cryptic setters wrote under forbidding pseudonyms — Torquemada in the Observer from the 1920s, later Ximenes and Azed — and their puzzles started out closer to riddles than to fair games. What changed that was Ximenes (Derrick Somerset Macnutt), whose 1966 book Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword set out the principles of fair cluing that most British setters still follow: the clue must say what it means, the wordplay must work precisely, and the solver must be able to prove the answer.

The New York Times, and the modern American puzzle

The New York Times resisted crosswords for decades, dismissing them as a frivolity — and then launched one in 1942, partly as a distraction during the war. Its first crossword editor, Margaret Farrar, had edited that 1924 Simon & Schuster book, and she established the conventions that define the American puzzle: symmetrical grids, no unchecked letters, no obscure abbreviations for their own sake, and a difficulty curve across the week.

Later editors — most famously Will Shortz, who took over in 1993 — pushed the puzzle towards contemporary language, themes and wordplay, and built the competitive scene around the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

The puzzle has also had a strange wartime cameo: in 1944, British intelligence briefly investigated the Daily Telegraph crossword after several D-Day codewords — Overlord, Utah, Omaha, Mulberry, Neptune — appeared in it over a few weeks. The setter, a schoolmaster, appears to have picked them up from pupils repeating words they had overheard.

The crossword now

Crosswords moved online early and thrived there. Digital grids brought checking tools, timers, and — the biggest change — constructor software, which made grid-filling tractable for anyone and opened the craft to a far wider and younger group of setters. Indie crossword publishing is now a real thing, and the vocabulary of mainstream puzzles has broadened considerably as a result.

The form itself has barely changed in a hundred and ten years. A grid, some numbers, and clues that cross — which is all Arthur Wynne needed to fill a page in 1913.

Common questions