History of the Crossword Puzzles

The Crossword Word Puzzle

A brief history of the crossword puzzles to everyone out there who loves doing it.  I've loved doing crosswords since my high-school years although lately, Sudoku tends to compete with it nowadays. It refreshes the mind, these gentler mental exercises.




A crossword is a word puzzle in a form of a square grid of white and shaded squares There are also variations in the form of a rectangular grid. The objective of the crossword puzzle is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases by solving the often tricky questions. There are clues provided both horizontally and vertically. 


The language is written left-to-right, placing the answer words and phrases in the grid from left to right and from top to bottom. The shaded squares are used such that they separate the words or phrases. The squares in which answers begin are numbered and the clues are referred to by these numbers, and a direction is given, for example, "5-Across" or "16-Down".  Crosswords usually indicate the number of words in a given answer, should there be more than one.


Arthur Wynne is credited as the inventor of the crossword puzzle. The crossword puzzle starts in 1913, with an English guy by the name of Arthur Wynne from Liverpool, England. He worked in the "tricks and jokes" department of the New York World newspaper.  He remembered how he and his grandfather used to play "Magic Square," a Victorian game which involved placing words and letters into spaces. Just before Christmas, on a Sunday, December 21, 1931, he decided to try something different for the weekend supplement of the newspaper.  It was rather similar to the magic square that he and his granddad played.

What Wynne did was separate the words with black spaces, then added the list of clues, for horizontal and vertical positioning. He gave us the first crossword puzzle.