History of the Crossword (Since 1913)

December 21, 1913: the first crossword

On a Sunday in December 1913, the New York World ran a new puzzle invented by Liverpool-born journalist Arthur Wynne. He called it a "Word-Cross" puzzle. The grid was diamond-shaped, not rectangular. There were no black squares. The clues were terse, the words mostly common. It was page 24 of the "FUN" Sunday supplement.

Wynne later said he wasn't trying to invent a new genre — he was filling space. The Sunday supplement editor needed something for that page, Wynne had been doodling word grids, and the Word-Cross fit. Reader response was instantaneous. Within months the World was running them weekly. Within two years, daily.

The misprint that gave the puzzle its name

In an early issue, a typesetter accidentally swapped the words in the title — "Cross-Word" instead of "Word-Cross." Wynne didn't bother correcting it. By the time he might have, the new spelling had stuck. Crossword entered the dictionary.

The 1920s: a national mania

By 1924, the crossword had jumped from the World to over 100 American newspapers. Simon & Schuster published the first crossword book that year — its launch was so successful that Macy's department stores reported the highest single-day book sales in their history.

The 1920s mania was so intense that the New York Times editorial board denounced crosswords as "a primitive sort of mental exercise." The Times's 1924 editorial called them "a sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words." It would take 18 more years for the Times to capitulate.

1942: the Times finally launches its own

December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor. The U.S. enters World War II. Among the immediate concerns of the Times editor: how to give exhausted, anxious readers something demanding-but-not-news to focus on during long air-raid blackouts.

The first New York Times crossword ran February 15, 1942. Its first editor was Margaret Farrar, recruited from the World. Farrar was the first to formalize the rules that have defined American-style crosswords ever since:

180-degree rotational symmetry of the black squares
Every white square must be part of both an Across and a Down word
No 2-letter words
Themed grids on Sundays; "freestyle" grids during the week
Clue difficulty escalates Mon → Sat (Sunday is theme-led, easier than Saturday)

Farrar edited the Times crossword for 27 years. The Mon–Sat difficulty curve and the Sunday theme grid — the conventions modern American solvers expect — are her invention.

The editor war: Will Weng and Eugene Maleska

In the 1970s and 80s, the Times crossword went through two editors with very different visions: Will Weng (1969–1977), who liked playful clues, themed-week tricks, and contemporary references; and Eugene Maleska (1977–1993), who reverted to a stricter, academically-leaning style with classical-Greek mythology and obscure ornithology clues.

Solvers split into camps. The Maleska era, in retrospect, is sometimes called the "stuffy" period. By the late 80s, even loyal solvers were complaining the puzzles felt out of touch.

1993: Will Shortz takes over

Will Shortz, founder of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (1978), took the Times editor chair in 1993. He had been editor of Games magazine for 15 years. His mandate from the Times: modernize.

Shortz kept Farrar's rules but loosened the cultural references — pop music, sports, slang, movie quotes — and welcomed constructors from a much wider demographic pool than Maleska had. He also introduced the rebus puzzle (where multiple letters can occupy a single cell) as a recurring Thursday format.

The Shortz era is the one most modern American solvers grew up with. It's also when crossword-construction software (Crossword Compiler in 1995) democratized the craft — anyone with a wordlist and a few hundred dollars could now construct competitive puzzles.

The British tradition: cryptics

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the British were doing something completely different. The British "cryptic crossword" — clues that combine a definition with a wordplay instruction — emerged in the 1920s in the Saturday Westminster Gazette.

A cryptic clue might read: "Hat held by hot-air balloon (6)" → answer FEDORA. The definition is "hat"; the wordplay is "FED" (held by) inside "OR-A" (a hot-air-balloon anagram).

American solvers find cryptics infuriating; British solvers find American "definition-only" clues boring. Both styles co-exist; the Times of London has run a daily cryptic since 1930.

The mini revolution (2014–present)

In 2014, the New York Times launched the Mini Crossword — a 5×5 daily puzzle designed to be solved in under 2 minutes. It was a runaway hit. The Mini bought the crossword a younger demographic that the full daily had been losing.

The Mini's success kicked off the "small-puzzle daily-habit" boom that includes Wordle (2021), Connections (2023), Spelling Bee, Strands, and our own Daily Crossword Quick (5×5). Short, satisfying, daily — the modern format.

The crossword today

110+ years after Wynne's first puzzle, the crossword is the most globally recognized word game on earth. Daily crosswords run in:

USA: NYT (220k subscribers as of 2024), USA Today, LA Times, Wall Street Journal
UK: The Times, The Guardian, Telegraph, FT — all with cryptic + concise variants
France: Le Monde, Le Figaro — with French-style "définition" clues
Germany: Zeit-Magazin, Süddeutsche — with compound-word constructions
Italy: La Settimana Enigmistica (the world's oldest continuously-published crossword magazine, since 1932)
Spain: El País, ABC — with Spanish-language conventions

Each language has tweaked the form. French crosswords commonly use definition-style clues and accept accented characters. German crosswords lean heavily on compound-word constructions because German has compound words. Italian "Settimana Enigmistica" regularly publishes crosswords with photos and rebuses that no English-language puzzle would.

What's next?

Puzzle constructors are experimenting with new formats:

Themed daily-mini variants — Strands (2024) blends crossword with word search
Crowd-sourced grids — Reddit communities r/crosswords and r/AcrosticPuzzles publish constructor-of-the-week
AI-assisted clue writing — controversial; constructors are split on whether GPT-style models produce clues that meet professional standards
Multilingual playthroughs — what we're building. Native crossword conventions per language, not auto-translated grids

Try one yourself

Today's Daily Crossword (9×9) — our main puzzle, ~10 min
Quick 5×5 — Mini-style, ~3 min
Browse all 365 levels

The History of the Crossword