AMERICAN ICONprologue
SCIENCEHIST
ORY^ IMAGES^ /ALAMY;^COURTESYWILLSHORTZ12 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019Father of^
crosswords: The
New York World’s
Arthur Wynne
came to the
U.S. to pursue
a career in
journalism.N A BLUSTERY winter day in 1913, Arthur Wynne sat
in his offi ce at the New York World and wrestled with
a problem. The Christmas edition of “Fun,” the jokes
and puzzles supplement he managed, was being laid
out and Wynne felt readers needed a new challenge.
A Liverpool native, Wynne had emigrated to the
United States at age 19, but before he did he might
have seen some rudimentary word-form puzzles,
which were popular in late 19th-century England.
Perhaps inspired by those, as well as the “Sator”
square, an ancient, fi ve-word Latin palindrome,
Wynne designed a numbered, diamond-shape grid
with an empty center. He inserted “fun” at the top
as the fi rst “across” entry and called it “Word-Cross.”
Some of the clues required readers to know esoter-
ic facts (apparently “nard” is an aromatic plant that
grows mainly in the Himalayas), but others were
puckish. An illustrator later accidentally changed
“Word-Cross” to “Cross-Word,” with no objection
from Wynne, and the name stuck.
Thus Arthur Wynne is credited as the inventor of
what is arguably the fi rst mobile game—the Ameri-
can-style crossword puzzle, notable for its intellec-
tual challenge and defi nitional yet amusing clues.
In 1924, Richard Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster,
who had recently opened a publishing house in
New York, honored the pleas of Simon’s puz-
zle-loving aunt and printed a collection
of crosswords, throwing in a free pencil
to sweeten the deal. The fi rst crossword
puzzle book—an untested and decided-
ly nonliterary format—worried the fi rm so
much that the fi rm’s name did not appear on the
book, which had a small printing of 3,600 copies.
The publisher needn’t have been concerned ; the
book was an immediate success. The fi rst run soldout quickly and the company ran additional print-
ings. The book eventually sold more than 100,
copies, perhaps spurred on by groups like the Ama-
teur Cross Word Puzzle League of America, itself a
creation of marketing-savvy Simon & Schuster.
The league began the process of standardizing the
appearance of crosswords as early as 1924, instituting
rules such as “all over interlock,” which meant that no
part of the grid could be completely cut off by the black
squares; only one-sixth of the squares could be black;
and the grid design had to be symmetrical. Other
changes, like outlawing two-letter words, came later.
America had now tasted the satisfaction of creat-
ing order out of chaos, the Zen of making something
from nothing. Solving crosswords could fairly be
called a craze. The activity had become so prevalent
that the Times of London decried it in an editorial
called “An Enslaved America.” Devotees spiced their
conversation with obsolete words that were crop-
ping up in crossword puzzles. There was even a 1924
song called “Cross-word Mamma You Puzzle Me (But
Papa’s Gonna Figure You Out).”
The crossword fad , however, plagued librarians,
who complained that puzzle “fans” were swarm-
ing the reference desk, clamoring for dic-
tionaries and encyclopedias to help fi nd
answers, and pushing aside more “legiti-
mate” readers and students.
Crosswords were now being published
almost everywhere—except in the New York
Times, the last major metropolitan newspaper to
off er the puzzle. A 1924 editorial in the Times called
crosswords “a primitive sort of mental exercise.”
But the war that began for America in 1941 gave1126
15112166
22Unlike today’s
grids, Wynne’s
had no internal
black squares.
One clue asked,
“What this puz-
zle is.” Answer:
“Hard.”