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From WinkyPedia, the free encyclopedia that tells you what you already knew
A crossword is a word puzzle in which answers to clues are written into a grid of squares, crossing each other. The first one was published on 21 December 1913 in the New York World newspaper, created by Arthur Wynne, a journalist born in Liverpool. It was diamond-shaped, had no black squares and was called a “Word-Cross”.[1] Within a few weeks the name had become “Cross-Word”, and the rest of the world has been stuck on 7 across ever since.
Crosswords became a huge craze in the United States in the mid-1920s, after the first books of crossword puzzles were published. Libraries reported that their dictionaries were being worn out by solvers, and some newspapers warned that the puzzles were a waste of time.[2] In 1924 one leading New York newspaper described the craze in an editorial as a “sinful waste” of effort. It held out against crosswords until 1942, when it started publishing one of its own, which later became one of the most famous in the world.
British newspapers followed in the 1920s and 1930s, developing the cryptic crossword, in which every clue is a small riddle and the answer is usually obvious only after it has been revealed.
Modern American crosswords are usually square, with patterns of black squares that look the same when the grid is turned upside down. The first crossword, being diamond-shaped, would have looked the same as well, though only because nobody could tell which way was up.