4 Interesting Things You Didn’t Know About Crossword Puzzles

A crossword puzzle is a word puzzle that usually consists of a square or rectangular grid of white and black shaded squares. By answering clues that lead to the solutions, the purpose of the game is to fill the white squares with letters, producing words or phrases. Arthur Wynne is credited with having invented the modern crossword puzzle in 1913. 

The boxes in Wynne's original puzzle were organised in a diamond shape, not a square, with an open area in the centre, rather than the square shape we see today. The rules, though, were nearly identical. Each horizontal and vertical row of boxes corresponded to one word, and each word was given a brief clue. Wynne's puzzle is still completely solvable for 21st-century word nerds over a century later. Here are 4 interesting Crossword puzzle facts that you should know about. 

Arthur Wynne created the crossword puzzle 
A journalist by profession, Arthur Wynne devised the game based on his childhood memories of playing an archaic word-based grid game. This is how the crossword puzzles came into being. Despite the fact that Wynne's crossword puzzle was based on earlier puzzle shapes, such as the word diamond, he added a number of new features to it. For instance, the use of horizontal and vertical lines to create boxes for solvers to enter letters were brought about by him. He was the first to use black squares in a symmetrical pattern to separate words in rows and columns. 

A crossword wizard is known as a cruciverbalist 
Yes, you read it right. There’s a specific term assigned to the art of creating and solving crossword puzzles. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a person who enjoys or is skilled at crosswords as a “Cruciverbalist”. However, the person who creates crossword puzzles is known as a constructor, compiler or setter. 

The crossword puzzle was originally known as ‘Word-Cross’ 
The first crossword puzzle, designed by Arthur Wynne and published in the New York World, was dubbed "Word-Cross." The name was modified due to an error, which caused the hyphen to be removed and the words to be reversed. Even though it was incorrect, the new name has remained popular to this day. 

The New York World published the first crossword puzzle in 1913 
The first crossword puzzle was published in the New York World newspaper's Christmas edition as part of the entertainment section. It was published in the newspaper on Sunday, December 21, 1913. Moreover, while the New York World had a huge success with crossword puzzles, other newspapers stayed away from publishing them for at least a decade. This is since they were difficult to print and prone to errors, making them an editor's worst nightmare.