What is Crossword?

A crossword is a word puzzle that normally takes the form of a square or rectangular grid of white and shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages which are written left-to-right, the answer words and phrases are placed in the grid from left to right and from top to bottom. The shaded squares are used to separate the words or phrases.
Squares in which answers begin are usually numbered. The clues are then referred to by these numbers and a direction, for example, "4-Across" or "20-Down". At the end of the clue the total number of letters is sometimes given, depending on the style of puzzle and country of publication. Some crosswords will also indicate the number of words in a given answer, should there be more than one.

Terminology

The horizontal and vertical lines of white cells into which answers are written are commonly called entries or answers. The clues are usually called just that, or sometimes definitions. White cells are sometimes called lights, and the shaded cells are sometimes called darks, blanks, blocks, or just simply black squares or shaded squares.
A white cell that is part of two entries (both Across and Down) is called checked, keyed or crossed. A white cell that is part of only one entry is called unchecked, unkeyed or uncrossed.
The creating of crosswords is called cruciverbalism among its practitioners, who are referred to as cruciverbalists, from the Latin for cross and word. Although the terms have existed since the mid 1970s, non-cruciverbalists rarely use them, calling crossword creators constructors or (especially outside the United States) setters or compilers.

Types of grid

Crossword grids such as those appearing in most North American newspapers and magazines feature solid areas of white squares. Every letter is checked, and usually each answer is required to contain at least three letters. In such puzzles shaded squares are traditionally limited to about one-sixth of the design. Crossword grids elsewhere, such as in Britain and Australia, have a lattice-like structure, with a higher percentage of shaded squares, leaving up to half the letters in an answer unchecked. For example, if the top row has an answer running all the way across, there will be no across answers in the second row.
Another tradition in puzzle design (in North America and Britain particularly) is that the grid should have 180-degree rotational symmetry, so that its pattern appears the same if the paper is turned upside down. Most puzzle designs also require that all white cells be orthogonally contiguous (that is, connected in one mass through shared sides, to form a single polyomino).
The design of Japanese crossword grids often follows two additional rules: that shaded cells may not share a side and that the corner squares must be white.
The "Swedish-Style" grid uses no clue numbers - the clues are contained in the cells which would normally be shaded in other countries. Arrows indicate in which direction the clues have to be answered, vertical or horizontal. This style of grid is used in several countries other than Sweden, usually in magazines with pages of A4 or similar size. The grid often has a photo of a pop or movie star replacing a block of squares, as a clue to one answer. These puzzles usually have no symmetry in the grid.
Substantial variants from the usual forms exist. Two of the common ones are barred crosswords, which use bold lines between squares (instead of shaded squares) to separate answers, and circular designs, with answers entered either radially or in concentric circles. Free form crosswords have simple designs and are not symmetric. Grids forming shapes other than squares are also occasionally used.
Puzzles are often one of several standard sizes. For example, many weekday puzzles (such as the New York Times crossword) are 15×15 squares, while weekend puzzles may be 21×21, 23×23, or 25×25. The New York Times puzzles also set a common pattern for American crosswords by increasing in difficulty throughout the week: the Monday puzzles are the easiest and the puzzles get harder until Saturday. The larger Sunday puzzle is approximately the same level of difficulty as a weekday-size Thursday puzzle. This has led U.S. solvers to use the day of the week as a shorthand when describing how hard a puzzle is: i.e, an easy puzzle may be referred to as a Monday or Tuesday, a medium-difficulty puzzle as a Wednesday and a truly difficult puzzle as a Saturday.
Typically, clues appear outside the grid, divided into an Across list and a Down list; the first cell of each entry contains a number referenced by the clue lists. For example, the answer to a clue labeled "17-Down" is entered with the first letter in the cell numbered "17", proceeding down from there. Numbers are almost never repeated; numbered cells are labeled consecutively, usually from left to right across each row, starting with the top row and proceeding downward. Some Japanese crosswords are numbered from top to bottom down each column, starting with the leftmost column and proceeding right.
Some crosswords do not number the clues, but have their clues in small print inside grid cells which act as blanks, each clue with a little arrow indicating in which direction from its initial cell the answer is to be written. This kind of crossword originated in Scandinavia and has many different names: "Arrowwords", "Pointers," or "Tipwords" in English, Autodefinidos in Spanish, "Mots Fléchés" in French, etc, and are very popular, often being printed larger than conventional crosswords (to allow adequate space for printing the clues) and are much-used in competitions.

Orthography

Capitalisation of answer letters is conventionally ignored. This ensures a proper name can have its initial capital letter checked with a non-capitalisable letter in the intersecting clue. Diacritical markings in foreign loanwords are ignored for similar reasons. In languages other than English, the status of diacritics varies according to the orthography of the particular language, thus:
- in French, in Spanish and in Italian, accent marks and most other diacritical markings are ignored: for instance, in French, the final E of answer ÊTRE can double as the final É of CONGÉ when written ETRE and CONGE;
- in German language crosswords, the umlauts ä, ö, and ü are dissolved into ae, oe, and ue, and ß is dissolved into ss.
- in Dutch crosswords, the ij digraph is considered one letter, filling one square, and the IJ and the Y (see Dutch alphabet) are considered distinct. Rules may vary in other word games.
- in Spanish crosswords, although ch and ll were once considered one letter each, they fill two squares.
- in Czech and Slovak, diacritics are respected and ch being considered one letter occupies one square.
- in Irish crosswords, the accents on Á É Í Ó Ú are all respected, so (for example) the Í in SÍB cannot double as the I in SLIABH.
- in Romanian, diacritics are ignored.

History

The first example of a crossword puzzle appeared on September 14, 1890, in the italian magazine Il Secolo Illustrato della Domenica. It was designed by Giuseppe Airoldi and titled "Per passare il tempo" ("To pass the time"). Airoldi's puzzle was a four-by-four grid with no shaded squares, but it included horizontal and vertical clues.
On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, a journalist from Liverpool, England, published a "word-cross" puzzle in the New York World that embodied most of the features of the genre as we know it. This puzzle is frequently cited as the first crossword puzzle, and Wynne as the inventor. Later, the name of the puzzle was changed to "crossword."
Crossword puzzles became a regular weekly feature in the World, and spread to other newspapers; the Boston Globe, for example was publishing them at least as early as 1917.
By the 1920s, the crossword phenomenon was starting to attract notice. In 1921, the New York Public Library reported that "The latest craze to strike libraries is the crossword puzzle," and complained that when "the puzzle 'fans' swarm to the dictionaries and encyclopedias so as to drive away readers and students who need these books in their daily work, can there be any doubt of the Library's duty to protect its legitimate readers?" In October 1922, newspapers published a comic strip by Clare Briggs entitled "Movie of a Man Doing the Cross-Word Puzzle," with an enthusiast muttering "87 across 'Northern Sea Bird'!!??!?!!? Hm-m-m starts with an 'M', second letter is 'U'... I'll look up all the words starting with an 'M-U...' mus-musi-mur-murd--Hot Dog! Here 'tis! Murre!". In 1923 a humorous squib in The Boston Globe has a wife ordering her husband to run out and "rescue the papers... the part I want is blowing down the street." "What is it you're so keen about?" "The Cross-Word Puzzle. Hurry, please, that's a good boy."
The first book of crossword puzzles appeared in 1924, published by Simon and Schuster. "This odd-looking book with a pencil attached to it" was an instant hit and crossword puzzles became the craze of 1924.
Initially, some viewed the crossword puzzle with alarm, and some expected (even hoped) that it would be a short-lived fad. In 1924, The New York Times complained of the "sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex. This is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport... get nothing out of it except a primitive form of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development." A clergyman called the working of crossword puzzles "the mark of a childish mentality" and said "There is no use for persons to pretend that working one of the puzzles carries any intellectual value with it.". In 1925 Time Magazine noted that nine Manhattan dailies and fourteen other big newspapers were carrying crosswords, and quoted opposing views as to whether "This crossword craze will positively end by June!" or "The crossword puzzle is here to stay!" In 1925 the New York Times noted, with approval, a scathing critique of crosswords by The New Republic; but concluded that "Fortunately, the question of whether the puzzles are beneficial or harmful is in no urgent need of an answer. The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will be forgotten." and in 1929 declared "The cross-word puzzle, it seems, has gone the way of all fads...." In 1930 a correspondent noted that "Together with The Times of London, yours is the only journal of prominence that has never succumbed to the lure of the cross-word puzzle" and said that "The craze—the fad—stage has passed, but there are still people numbering it to the millions who look for their daily cross-word puzzle as regularly as for the weather predictions." The New York Times, however, was not to publish a crossword puzzle until 1942.
The term crossword first appeared in a dictionary in 1930.
Today, there are many popular crosswords distributed in American newspapers and online. The most prestigious (and among the most difficult to solve) are the New York Times puzzles. The first editor of the New York Times crossword was Margaret Farrar, who was editor from 1942 to 1969. She was succeeded by Will Weng, who was succeeded by Eugene T. Maleska. Since 1993, they have been edited by Will Shortz, the fourth crossword editor in Times. In 1978 Shortz founded and still directs the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
Simon and Schuster continues to publish the Crossword Puzzle Book Series books that it began in 1924, currently under the editorship of John M. Samson. The original series ended in 2007 after 258 volumes. Since 2008, these books are now in the Mega series, appearing three times per year and each featuring 300 puzzles.
The British cryptic crossword was imported to the US in 1968 by composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim in New York magazine. Until 2006, the Atlantic Monthly regularly featured a cryptic crossword "puzzler" by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, which combines cryptic clues with diabolically ingenious variations on the construction of the puzzle itself. In both cases, no two puzzles are alike in construction, and the intent of the puzzle authors is to entertain with novelty, not to establish new variations of the crossword genre.
In the United Kingdom, the Sunday Express was the first newspaper to publish a crossword on November 2, 1924, a Wynne puzzle adapted for the UK. The first crossword in Britain, according to Tony Augarde in his "Oxford Guide to Word Games" (1984), was in "Pearson's Magazine" for February 1922.

Crossword puzzles in World War II

In 1944 Allied security officers were disturbed by the appearance, in a series of crosswords in The Daily Telegraph, of words that were secret code names for military operations planned as part of Operation Overlord. "Utah" (the code name for one of the landing sites) appeared in a puzzle on May 2, 1944. Subsequent puzzles included the landing site "Omaha" and "Mulberry"; the secret artificial harbours.
On June 2, four days before the invasion, the puzzle included both "Neptune" (the naval operations plan) and "Overlord". The author of the puzzles, a schoolteacher named Leonard Dawe, was interviewed. The investigators concluded that the appearance of the words was not an attempt to pass messages. According to a former crossword editor of The Daily Telegraph, in 1984 a former student of Dawe's claimed that he had picked up the words from soldiers' conversations around the army camps, and included them when helping Dawe to choose words to fill crossword grids. Marc Romano, author of the book Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession, gives a number of reasons why he believes the story is implausible.
Some cryptologists for Bletchley Park were selected after doing well in a crossword-solving competition.

Crossword records

According to Guinness Records, May 15, 2007, the most prolific crossword compiler is Roger Squires of Ironbridge, Shropshire, UK. On May 14, 2007 he published his 66,666th crossword, equivalent to 2 million clues. He is one of only four setters to have provided cryptic puzzles to The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the Financial Times and The Independent. He also holds the record for the longest word ever used in a published crossword - the 58-letter Welsh town Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch clued as an anagram.
Enthusiasts have compiled a number of record-setting achievements for the New York Times crossword, the most prestigious American-style crossword:
- The lowest word count in a published weekday-size 15x15 puzzle is the January 21, 2005 New York Times crossword by Frank Longo, with just 52 words, and was believed by Times crossword editor Will Shortz to be the world record for this type of puzzle.
- The fewest shaded squares in a weekday American crossword is the August 22, 2008 Times crossword by Kevin G. Der, with just 18 shaded squares out of 225 total.
- The record for most crossword published in the New York Times is held by Manny Nosowsky, who has had 241 puzzles in that outlet.

Crosswords in non-English languages

Although the crossword is an English-language invention and most common in English-speaking countries, other countries have crosswords in their respective languages.
French-language crosswords are smaller than English-language ones, and not necessarily square: usually 8–13 rows and columns, totaling 81–130 squares. They need not be symmetric and two-letter words are allowed, unlike in most English-language puzzles. Compilers strive to minimize use of shaded squares. 10% is typical; Georges Perec compiled many 9×9 grids for Le Point with four or even three. Rather than numbering the individual clues, the rows and columns are numbered as on a chessboard. All clues for a given row or column are listed, against its number, as separate sentences. This is similar to the notation used in the aforementioned Daily Mail Blankout puzzles.
In Italy, crosswords are usually oblong and larger than French ones, 13x21 being a common size. As in France, they usually are not symmetrical; two-letter words are allowed; and the number of shaded squares is minimized. Nouns (including surnames) and the infinitive or past participle of verbs are allowed, as are abbreviations; in larger crosswords, it is customary to put at the center of the grid phrases made of two to four words, or forenames and surnames. A variant of Italian crosswords does not use shaded squares: words are delimited by thickening the grid. Another variant starts with a blank grid: the solver must insert both the answers and the shaded squares, and Across and Down clues are either ordered by row and column or not ordered at all.
Particularly curious is the Japanese language crossword; due to the writing system, one syllable (typically katakana) is entered into each white cell of the grid rather than one letter, resulting in the typical solving grid seeming rather small in comparison to those of other languages. Any second Yoon character is treated as a full syllable and is rarely written with a smaller character. Even cipher crosswords have a Japanese equivalent, although pangrammaticity does not apply. The crossword with kanji to fill in are also produced, but in far smaller number as it takes far more effort to construct one. Despite having three writing forms, hiragana, katakana and kanji, they are rarely mixed in a crossword puzzle.
In Poland, crosswords typically use British-style grids, but some do not have shaded cells. Shaded cells are often replaced by boxes with clues - such crosswords are called Swedish puzzles or Swedish-style crosswords. In a vast majority of Polish crosswords, nouns are the only allowed words.
Modern Hebrew is normally written with only the consonants; vowels are either understood, or entered as diacritical marks. This can lead to ambiguities in the entry of some words, and compilers generally specify that answers are to be entered in ktiv male (with some vowels) or ktiv haser (without vowels). Further, since Hebrew is written from right to left, but Roman numerals are used and written from left to right, there can be an ambiguity in the description of lengths of entries, particularly for multi-word phrases. Different compilers and publications use differing conventions for both of these issues.
In India a setter named A. N. Prahlada Rao from Bangalore has composed some 22,000 crossword puzzles in the language Kannada, including 5,000 crosswords based on films made in Kannada, with a total of 600,000 (six hundred thousand or six lakhs) clues. He has contributed crosswords to 24 periodicals including 3 dailies. He has created crosswords with themes ranging from Film to Mythology to Crime to Food to the works of famous Kannada novelists. A five volume set of his puzzles was released in February 2008.

(This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Crossword".)