The first crossword, and how it took over the newspaper
The first crossword appeared on 21 December 1913 in the New York World, in a Sunday supplement called Fun. It was set by Arthur Wynne, a journalist born in Liverpool, and it was called a Word-Cross. The grid was a diamond with a hollow centre rather than the square we know now, but the idea was already complete: numbered clues, and answers that cross each other so that every word helps you with the ones around it.
Within about a decade it had gone from one paper’s novelty to a national craze, and within a few more decades to a fixture of almost every newspaper in the English-speaking world.
From Word-Cross to crossword
Wynne’s puzzle was popular enough to become a weekly feature. The name soon changed to Cross-Word, and the hyphen eventually disappeared. The shape changed too. Setters moved to square grids with black squares, which made the puzzle easier to fit on a page and gave them room to make grids of different sizes.
For its first ten years the crossword was mostly a New York World feature. Few other papers carried it, and it had no settled rules about how a grid should look.
The craze of 1924
The change came in 1924, when a new publishing firm, Simon & Schuster, made its first book a collection of crosswords. It came with a pencil attached, and it sold far beyond anything its publishers had expected. More books followed, and the crossword became a national fad in the United States. Newspapers that had ignored it rushed to run one.
It crossed the Atlantic in the same years. British papers began printing crosswords in the 1920s, and The Times in London published its first in 1930. British setters took the puzzle in a different direction. Their grids leave some letters unchecked, meaning they belong to only one answer, and their clues became the cryptic kind, where each clue is a small wordplay puzzle as well as a definition.
How the New York Times came round
The New York Times held out for years, treating the crossword as a passing fashion that did not belong in a serious paper. It changed its mind during the Second World War. The paper’s first Sunday crossword appeared in February 1942, a couple of months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, partly as something to take readers’ minds off the news.
Its first crossword editor, Margaret Farrar, had already edited the Simon & Schuster books, and Farrar’s standards shaped the rules American crosswords still follow. A daily puzzle joined the Sunday one in 1950. The conventions that settled in over those years are the ones you still see in an American grid: every letter belongs to two answers, the pattern of black squares looks the same when the grid is turned upside down, and answers are at least three letters long.
Why it became a daily habit
A crossword suits a newspaper unusually well. It takes one fixed amount of space, it can be solved on paper with nothing but a pencil, and a new one arrives with every issue. It also rewards coming back. Setters have recognisable styles, and regular solvers learn the short words that turn up again and again because their letters make grids easy to fill.
Difficulty is often scheduled as well. In the New York Times the weekday puzzle gets harder from Monday to Saturday, so a new solver can start early in the week and move on as they improve. Many papers follow something similar, which means the same puzzle can serve a beginner on one day and an expert on another.
The crossword has since moved onto phones and websites, but the thing that made it last has not changed. It is one puzzle a day, the same for every reader, and it is finished when the last square is filled.
