All about Word-Cross, the world's first crossword puzzle  

If you were asked about any good English puzzle game, chances are high that you would say crossword. It is loved unanimously by adults and children. After all, it challenges your brain while relaxing you after a busy day of school and it is indeed a good break from your textbooks. But how much do you really know about these brainteasers? Do you know who created them or how they were born? Let us dive into their history and evolution.  

Word-Cross was diamond-shaped  
So, the first ever crossword was invented by British journalist Arthur Wynne, who had emigrated to the United States in the 1890s. Called the ‘Word-Cross’, it was published on the 'Fun' page of The New York World, a Sunday weekly newspaper in the US, on December 21, 1913. A few weeks later, due to a typographical error, the puzzle's title went as “Cross-Word” instead of Word-Cross and the name stuck. 

But was this like the present-day crossword? No, it was similar but there were many things different too. For one, it was diamond-shaped i.e the boxes were arranged in a diamond shape and not a square, with an open space in the middle. Two, it didn't have across or down moves. Three, there were no black squares inside it. Barring that, the rules were exactly the same. Each horizontal and vertical row of boxes corresponded to one word each, and a short clue was given for each word.  

Evolution of Crossword  
During the early 1920s, other newspapers too picked up this newly discovered brain booster. You can say that within a decade, crossword puzzles were included in many American and British newspapers. In the same format? No, Wynne kept experimenting with many different shapes, eventually settling on a rectangle. Over time, he also pioneered the use of black squares in a symmetrical arrangement to separate words in rows and columns. And crosswords started assuming their current form.  

Crosswords first made their appearance in a British publication in Pearson's Magazine in February 1922. British puzzles quickly developed their own style in parallel and were considerably more difficult than the American ones. In particular, the cryptic crosswords became established and quite popular, the governing rules for which were laid down by British crossword compilers AF Ritchie and DS Macnutt. But how were they different from their American counterparts? Unlike American-style crosswords, in which clues would be usually synonyms or bits of trivia, a cryptic crossword contained clues in form of small puzzles in and of themselves. Millions of these cryptic puzzles were published and the readers found these intriguing pieces of puzzles so interesting and challenging that they started sharing their time speeds for solving the crosswords.  

Crypto crosswords and World War II  
Seeing the popularity of the crypto crosswords, The Daily Telegraph, the national British newspaper, put up a competition in 1941 to see who could beat the time of 12 minutes in solving a crypto crossword. It got 25 competitors to the newsroom to test their speeds. The winner took 7 minutes and 57.5 seconds to solve it. But the story didn’t end there. These competitors were apparently contacted by the War Office, who felt their skills would be useful as cryptographers for code-breaking work. Imagine! 

Birth of many board games  
In fact, crosswords also formed the groundstone for many popular board games over the next many decades. In the early 1930s, Alfred Mosher Butts, an American architect, decided to create a board game based on the principles of the crossword puzzle. Can you guess this game that he invented? It was the ‘Scrabble’ that we all know and love today, the game of chance and skill combining elements of anagrams and crossword puzzles. 

Many other puzzles based on a grid square were launched subsequently and have become popular in recent years, such as Sudoku (invented in the US) and Nonograms (or Griddlers) (a Japanese invention).  

Fun fact: A lover of crosswords is called a cruci​ver​bal​ist. Also, December 21 is now celebrated as “National Crossword Puzzle Day”.