A Short History of Word Games

Ancient origins (4th century BC – 1800)

Anagrams are the oldest form of wordplay. Greek poets used them as a literary device (anagrammatismos). Medieval Jewish kabbalists believed sacred names yielded mystical meanings when rearranged. The 17th-century French court of Louis XIII employed Thomas Billon, an official "Anagrammatist to the King," whose only job was to compose flattering anagrams of nobles' names.

Acrostics and palindromes appear in classical Latin (the SATOR square) and medieval Arabic poetry. Riddles are even older — the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book (10th century) contains 95 riddles still recognizable as a word-game format today.

1894 — Hangman

Hangman first appears in print in Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland by Alice Bertha Gomme in 1894. She traces it to Victorian-era schoolyards under the name "Birds, Beasts, and Fishes." The drawing element — adding a body part for each wrong letter — comes from the same period as a teaching device, helping children visualize how many guesses they had left.

Hangman lived almost entirely on classroom whiteboards for a century, until Microsoft published a Basic-language Hangman as their first commercial software product in 1979. Play Daily Hangman.

1913 — The first crossword

December 21, 1913: Liverpool-born journalist Arthur Wynne published the first "Word-Cross" puzzle in the New York World Sunday supplement. A typesetting error swapped the words in the title to "Cross-Word"; the new spelling stuck and entered the dictionary as crossword.

The crossword exploded in popularity through the 1920s. By 1924, Simon & Schuster's first crossword book was the year's bestseller. The New York Times denounced crosswords editorially as "a primitive sort of mental exercise" — and held out from publishing one until 1942. Play Daily Crossword · read the deep-dive history.

1938 — Scrabble

Architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented Scrabble (originally called "Lexiko," then "Criss-Crosswords") during the Great Depression. He spent years analyzing letter-frequency in front-page newspaper articles to calibrate the tile distribution that's still used today. James Brunot bought the rights in 1948, refined the rules, and trademarked the SCRABBLE name. By 1953, Macy's department store was selling 6,000 sets per week. Play Tile-Based Scrabble.

1954 — The Daily Jumble

Martin Naydel created the Jumble (also called Word Scramble) for newspaper syndication in 1954. Henri Arnold and Bob Lee took it over in 1962 and ran it for nearly four decades, establishing the modern multi-round-plus-bonus format. The bonus phrase — almost always a pun tied to the day's theme — is what distinguishes Jumble from a plain anagram puzzle. Play Daily Word Scramble.

1977 — Word Ladder by Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll invented Word Ladder (he called it "Doublets") in 1877 and published it in Vanity Fair magazine. He called it "the most popular puzzle ever invented." Modern algorithms can find the shortest ladder between any two words in milliseconds via breadth-first search. Play Daily Word Ladder.

2014 — The Mini Crossword

The New York Times launched the Mini Crossword in 2014: a 5×5 daily puzzle designed to be solved in under 2 minutes. It bought the crossword a younger demographic the full daily was losing, and kicked off the "small-puzzle daily-habit" boom that would soon define the genre. Play Quick Crossword.

2021 — Wordle

Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle created Wordle in 2021 as a gift for his partner. He launched it publicly in October 2021; by January 2022 it had over 2 million daily players, and the New York Times bought it for "low seven figures" in February 2022. The mechanic — 5 letters, 6 guesses, green/yellow/gray feedback — predates Wordle (it derives from a 1950s board game called Jotto and a 1980s TV show called Lingo) but Wardle's daily-puzzle, share-card format is what made it stick. Play Daily Word · read the deep-dive on Wordle.

2023 — NYT Connections

The New York Times launched Connections in mid-2023. The mechanic — sort 16 words into 4 themed groups — appeared in pub-quiz format for decades, made TV in Only Connect on BBC in 2008, and went viral as a daily web puzzle when NYT picked it up. It became their second-most-played product within months. Play Daily Connections.

Today: the daily-habit boom

The pattern Wordle established — a single short daily puzzle, same for everyone, with a shareable result card — is now the dominant format. Spelling Bee, Strands, Connections, our own Daily Word and Daily Crossword all use it. The genre's evolution continues: each year brings 5-10 new daily-puzzle launches, with formats spanning everything from classic crosswords to brand-new mechanics like our Hidden Word game.

Browse all word games

We host 31 daily word games across all the major formats. Visit /daily-challenges/ for today's full list, or browse /word-games/ for the catalog.