Beginnings of the Crossword Puzzles

Here’s a brief history of the crossword puzzles to everyone out there who loves to doing it – young and young once. I was crazy about crosswords in my high-school years and on to early years at college.  Lately, Sudoku has taken over when I get the chance to indulge in this kind of 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.

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.

Arthur Wynne 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.

Here are interesting links:

• Free Crossword Puzzles

• Thinks Daily Crossword

Image Credit:  Wikimedia Commons
*
*

Share this article