A Short History of the Crossword Puzzle
The crossword is barely more than a century old, yet it feels timeless. Its story begins in a newspaper and runs straight through to the puzzle you might solve on our home page today.
1913: the first “word-cross”
On December 21, 1913, a journalist named Arthur Wynne published a diamond-shaped “word-cross” in the New York World. It had no black squares yet, but it had the essential idea: interlocking words clued by definitions. A typesetter’s error soon flipped the name to “cross-word,” and it stuck.
1924: the puzzle becomes a craze
A young publishing house, Simon & Schuster, gambled on the first book of crosswords in 1924. It was a runaway hit and set off a national craze, complete with crossword-themed fashion and music. The black-square grid and left-right symmetry we know today were standardized in these years — the conventions we unpack in crossword grids explained.
Across the Atlantic and into the dailies
Britain embraced a knottier, wordplay-driven style that became the cryptic crossword. In the United States, the form matured into the elegant definitional puzzles found in major papers, including the daily Wall Street Journal Crossword, which carries on that newspaper tradition six days a week.
More than a hundred years on, the appeal is unchanged: a quiet, satisfying contest between you and a constructor. If you’re curious why that contest is so good for you, read about the brain benefits of crosswords — or just dive into today’s answers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who invented the crossword?
Journalist Arthur Wynne is credited with the first crossword — a “word-cross” published in the New York World on December 21, 1913.
When did crosswords become popular?
The craze took off in 1924, when Simon & Schuster published the first book of crossword puzzles and it became a bestseller.
