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Crosswords

The crossword puzzle is the most universally played puzzle game worldwide, and the most familiar and ubiquitous word-based game in history. According to the U.S. Department of Census's 2006 Compendia, when adults are quizzed on their frequent leisure activities, over 30 million Americans pick up a crossword puzzle occasionally every year, and almost 13 million of those do so at least twice a week. Crosswords can be found in close to 100 percent of the world's daily newspapers. With the addition of reprints in magazines, solvers anthologies, and the thousands of puzzles available on the internet, the number of people who solve crossword puzzles, at least occasionally, is probably incalculably large.

History

Invented at the turn of the 20th century by Arthur Wynne, the editor of the “Fun” section of the New York World newspaper, and initially named “word-cross,” the first crossword puzzle was a simple affair. It was vaguely reminiscent of an ancient mystical word puzzle called a word square. Word squares have been found engraved in walls as far back as Roman times, and one was excavated in Herculaneum, the second city lost to the Vesu-vian eruption of 79 B.C.E.

The word square is a block of letters filling an equal number of columns and rows. Words appear twice, once horizontally and once vertically, in the same order left to right and top to bottom. Later variations on the word square were played as puzzles and did not require identical words on both axes; the words simply needed to interlock using all the grid spaces. Wynne borrowed this concept, which he recalled from puzzle books of his childhood in England, but rotated the square into a diamond with a hole of blanks in its center. The grid squares were numbered to indicate where the horizontally and vertically interlocked solutions began and ended. Clues were simple definitions of short, common words.

Soon after the introduction of the word-cross, a compositor's error fortuitously renamed the puzzle “crossword,” and the name stuck. Within three years crossword puzzles had become an American cultural mania. Anyone who has followed the history of Sudoku, the latest puzzle phenomenon, would recognize the pattern, although compared with crossword's enormous cultural effect, Sudoku is still a mere fad.

Puzzle Structure

This basic structure that Wynne created slowly evolved into the familiar American crossword puzzle, which conforms to several basic structural rules. In theory, a grid can be made to any size dimension. In practice, American crossword sizes range from 13 × 13 to 25 × 25, and tend to be built with an odd number of squares in the rows and column grid. The puzzle is always symmetrical on the diagonal. That means that if there is a black square in the fifth grid box from the left in the top row, there will be one at the fifth grid box in the bottom row, reading from the right. Or, more simply, if you flip the puzzle upside down, the grid will look the same both ways.

Puzzles are expected to contain more white squares than black ones. The proportional guideline has become more flexible in recent times, but most well-designed puzzles still conform to an approximately 6:1 ratio in what is referred to as an “open” grid. All of the white squares must connect with at least one other group of white squares—there can be no white boxes in an island of black squares, and every across definition must have at least one letter in it that is used in a down definition as well. In addition, the puzzle's white squares must all connect—you cannot have a puzzle with self-contained white grids divided from each other by black squares. Solving a puzzle is, by design, a cumulative process. Each solved word adds information about the longer or more obscure clues as the interlocking grid provides multiple entryways into the puzzle.

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