The History of the Crossword Puzzle: From 1913 to the New York Times

The crossword feels like it has always been here — folded into the back of a newspaper, waiting by the coffee pot. But the puzzle is barely more than a century old, and its story runs through a bored newspaper editor, a runaway 1920s craze, a brand-new publishing house that almost didn't dare put its name on the book, and a famous newspaper that spent eighteen years refusing to print one. Here's how the crossword puzzle went from a holiday space-filler to the most popular word game in the world. When you're done reading, you can play a crossword that descends directly from that very first grid.

Who invented the crossword puzzle?

The crossword was invented by Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool-born journalist working in New York. On 21 December 1913, Wynne needed something to fill space in the "Fun" supplement of the New York World, a Sunday newspaper. He drew a diamond-shaped grid with a hollow centre, numbered the squares, and wrote a set of clues for words reading across and down. He called it a "Word-Cross."

It wasn't entirely without ancestors — word squares and simple letter grids had appeared in children's puzzle books and even in ancient Rome. But Wynne's combination of a numbered grid, separate across-and-down clues, and interlocking answers was new, and it's the direct template for every crossword since. The very first answer, sitting at the top of his diamond, was already filled in for solvers as a hint: the word FUN.

A few weeks later, a typesetter accidentally transposed the title to "Cross-Word," and the new name stuck. The hyphen quietly disappeared over the following years, and the black squares and symmetrical square grid we know today arrived as Wynne and his imitators refined the format.

The crossword craze of the 1920s

For about a decade the crossword stayed a mostly American newspaper feature. Then, in the early 1920s, it exploded into a full-blown national obsession. Newspapers that didn't run a crossword started losing readers to those that did. Libraries reported people tying up dictionaries for hours. There were crossword-themed songs, dresses, and Broadway revues.

The tipping point came in 1924, when two young entrepreneurs named Richard Simon and Max Schuster published The Cross Word Puzzle Book — the first-ever collection of crosswords, and the very first book from their brand-new company. As the story goes, the idea came from Simon's aunt, who wanted to buy a book of crossword puzzles for a friend and discovered that none existed. The pair were so unsure it would sell that they released it under a different imprint, "Plaza Publishing," to protect their own names if it flopped. Each copy came with a pencil attached.

It did not flop. The book sold out almost immediately, ran through printing after printing, and effectively launched Simon & Schuster, which remains a major publisher today. The crossword had made its first fortune.

How the New York Times held out — then gave in

Not everyone was charmed. The New York Times, of all papers, looked down on the fad. A 1924 editorial famously dismissed the crossword as a "primitive sort of mental exercise" and "a sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words." For years the Times refused to print one, even as nearly every rival paper cashed in.

The paper finally relented during the Second World War. In February 1942, with readers craving distraction from grim headlines, the Times introduced a Sunday crossword — partly on the argument that people would need something calming to do during long blackout evenings. Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, who had edited those early World puzzles and then the Simon & Schuster books, became the Times' first crossword editor. She professionalised the craft, codifying conventions still followed today: grids with rotational symmetry, every letter "checked" by crossing another word, and no obscure entries without fair crossings. The daily Times crossword followed in 1950.

The British branch: cryptic crosswords

While American crosswords grew friendlier and more straightforward, British setters took the puzzle in a different, trickier direction. Through the late 1920s and 1930s, the cryptic crossword developed — a style where every clue hides its answer inside a piece of wordplay. Edward Powys Mathers, who set fiendish puzzles for The Observer under the pen name "Torquemada," is widely credited as the father of the cryptic. Later setters laid down the principle of fair play that still governs cryptics: a clue need not mean what it says, but it must say what it means.

If that tradition intrigues you, our guide on how to solve cryptic crosswords breaks down the wordplay device by device.

The modern crossword

The rest of the story is one of steady expansion. Will Shortz became the Times' crossword editor in 1993 — he holds a unique self-designed university degree in "enigmatology," the study of puzzles — and helped turn the crossword into a cultural touchstone, complete with a documentary (Wordplay) and a national tournament. Computers gave constructors powerful word lists and grid-filling software, and the internet moved millions of solvers from newsprint to screens.

Then came a twist that took the puzzle back to its roots: in 2014 the Times launched the Mini Crossword, a 5×5 grid solvable in a minute or two. Small, fast, mobile-friendly — it brought a whole new generation to a game their great-grandparents had been obsessed with a hundred years earlier. You can play that quick format on our own mini crossword, or settle in with a full-size grid below.

A bored editor, a printer's typo, a pencil taped to a book, and a newspaper that called it sinful: the crossword's history is far stranger than the tidy grid suggests. Want to add yourself to the story? Play a crossword now, or learn the conventions Margaret Farrar standardised in our crossword rules.