The first crossword puzzle stamp

The first crossword puzzle was invented by Arthur Wynne. Initially, it was called the word cross.

It was published on December 21, 1913, in the Sunday supplement of the New York World newspaper called Fun.

It had a diamond-shaped grid with a hollow center. It had no internal black squares. In the top 3 boxes, the word FUN was filled. The word Fun was also the name of the Sunday supplement of the New York World newspaper.

The square was numbered at the start and the end of each word. The total number of clues was 31. The definitions for the clues were synonym style.

The puzzle was printed with the instruction: Fill in the small squares with words that agree with the following definitions.

Solve The First Crossword Puzzle

Arthur Wynne's first crossword puzzle
ANSWER
First Crossword Puzzle -Solution

History Of The First Crossword Puzzle

Arthur Wynne (1871-1945) is credited for the invention of the first crossword puzzle. He was born in Liverpool, England. At the age of 19, he immigrated to the United States of America.

Arthur Wynne worked for the New York World newspaper. The newspaper had a Sunday supplement called Fun. The Fun section featured anagrams, connect-the-dots drawings, rebuses, etc.

For the Christmas edition, he came up with a more challenging word game than word square. In word square, the goal was to arrange the same words across and down.

The new puzzle he came up with was called word-cross. In word-cross, the words that were read across were different from the down words. Hence, the puzzle was challenging.

The puzzle was initially well-received. Therefore, the New York World magazine decided to continue the crossword puzzle for the next two successive Sundays to satisfy its readers.

The typesetters transposed the puzzle name into a cross-word. Then, the hyphen was dropped and named crossword puzzle forever! It has been the best word game ever even after a century!

Typesetting and typographical error was the main issue in that era. Hence, though the readers loved the puzzle other newspapers stayed a while away from printing the crossword puzzle.

Leave a Reply