The World's First Crossword
Arthur Wynne had the
job of devising the weekly puzzle page for Fun, the eight-page
comic section of the New York World. When he devised what he
called a Word-cross for the Christmas 1913 edition, published on
21 December he could have no idea that he would be starting a
worldwide craze.
The puzzle page had
previously featured plenty of word squares, rebuses, hidden
words, anagrams and connect-the-dots drawings. For this edition
Wynne decided he would have something new. He sketched out a
diamond-shaped grid, wrote FUN, the name of the comic section,
across the top squares, and started filling in the rest of the
grid. He numbered the squares at the start and end of each word,
and wrote definition clues for the words he had filled in. The
puzzle was printed with the instruction to the solver: "Fill
in the small squares with words which agree with the following
definitions.". Thus was the crossword born.
The new puzzle became
popular immediately, and continued to appear every week. One
change was that after a few weeks the name was changed from
Word-cross to Cross-word. After experimenting with different
shapes, including a circular puzzle, Wynne eventually settled on
a rectangular pattern. It was not until some time later that the
hyphen was dropped, and the Cross-word became a Crossword.
From the very first,
readers began sending in crosswords they had composed, and by
February 1914, Wynne was regularly using these readers'
submissions. There was a problem, however: the weekly crossword
was plagued by typesetting errors, and as a result it was decided
to drop the crossword. An immediate howl of outrage came from the
readers, and the crossword was reinstated after an absence of
only one week.
Surprisingly, despite
their popularity, crosswords appeared nowhere else but the New
York World. Then in 1924, a couple of newly-qualified graduates
of the Columbia School of Journalism, called Dick Simon and
Lincoln Schuster, set up in business as publishers. Looking for
something to publish, they settled on a book of the puzzles from
the New York World. This book was an immediate massive hit, and
launched the crossword craze worldwide.
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Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.
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2-3.
4-5.
6-7.
10-11.
14-15.
18-19.
22-23.
26-27.
28-29.
30-31.
8-9.
12-13.
16-17.
20-21.
24-25.
10-18.
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What bargain hunters enjoy.
A written acknowledgment.
Such and nothing more.
A bird.
Opposed to less.
What this puzzle is.
An animal of prey.
The close of a day.
To elude.
The plural of is.
To cultivate.
A bar of wood or iron.
What artists learn to do.
Fastened.
Found on the seashore.
The fibre of the gomuti palm.
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6-22.
4-26.
2-11.
19-28.
F-7.
23.30.
1-32.
33-34.
N-8.
24-31.
3-12.
20-29.
5-27.
9-25.
13-21.
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What we all should be.
A day dream.
A talon.
A pigeon.
Part of your head.
A river in Russia.
To govern.
An aromatic plant.
A fist.
To agree with.
Part of a ship.
One.
Exchanging.
To sink in mud.
A boy.
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See the solution.