On December 21, 1913, the first-ever crossword was published by the long-defunct New York World newspaper. Since then crossword puzzles have amused and delighted the world. They’re now found in almost every language and country.
The inventor of the puzzle was Arthur Wynne born on June 22, 1871, in Liverpool, England. He emigrated to the US in 1891, at the age of 19.
Wynne created the page of puzzles for the “Fun” section of the Sunday edition of the New York World. For the December 21, 1913, edition, he introduced a puzzle with a diamond shape and a hollow center, with the letters F-U-N already being filled in. He called it a “Word-Cross Puzzle.”
Although Wynne’s invention was based on earlier puzzle forms, such as the word diamond, he introduced a number of innovations (e.g. the use of horizontal and vertical lines to create boxes for solvers to enter letters).
He subsequently pioneered the use of black squares in a symmetrical arrangement to separate words in rows and columns. With the exception of the numbering scheme, the form of Wynne’s “Word-Cross” puzzles is that used for modern crosswords.
A few weeks after the first “Word-Cross” appeared, the name of the puzzle was changed to “Cross-Word” as a result of a typesetting error. Wynne’s puzzles have been known as “crosswords” ever since.
As Adrienne Raphel reported in Thinking Inside The Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, despite readers obviously loving crossword puzzles, for decades one institution disdained them: The New York Times.
For a few decades, the Times was the only major metropolitan newspaper in America without a crossword puzzle, and through the 20’s and 30’s, the paper ran op-eds decrying crosswords as a passing lowbrow craze.
But in 1942—two months after Pearl Harbor—the Times gave in and added a crossword section, to “keep readers sane with the rest of the news so bleak [and] provide readers something to occupy time during coming blackout days.”
Can you solve the first-ever crossword puzzle?
So if you’re looking for a throwback try solving that very first crossword puzzle that ran in the New York World today 109 years ago:
You can check your answers here
Related: Ancient Greek Crossword Puzzle Discovered in Smyrna
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