Across and Down

1 Across: Word that describes the author of this piece (14 letters).

Answer: Cruciverbalist

Yes, that’s what I am. A crossword lover! My day does not end until I have tackled my three daily crossword puzzles. Over the years while this has become a habit, in recent years I have been not just trying to crack the clues and fill in the blank squares with the right answers, but equally looking more closely at how the clues are framed. And every day, I applaud not so much myself for having got the answers, but even more the creator for the clever wording of the clues.

And as with most things that interest me, I am curious to know what goes on behind the scenes. That led me to the history of the crossword puzzle.

The earliest form may have been simple word games that were published in children’s books in the 19^th century in England.  These were called Word Squares where children had to fill in the words to fit the squares so that the words read the same across and down.

Arthur Wynne a young English boy in Liverpool was one of the children who had been taught by his grandfather to solve these puzzles. When he was 19, Arthur, emigrated to America. He went on to work with the newspaper New York World where he managed the jokes and puzzles supplement called Fun. One December day, as Arthur was working on the Christmas Edition of Fun he felt that the readers needed something new and challenging. He remembered the word games he used to play as a child. Drawing upon that memory Wynne designed a numbered, diamond-shape grid with an empty centre. As the first top Across entry, he inserted the word FUN. He fitted in words in the rest of the squares, for which he devised clues. He called this puzzle Word-Cross. An illustrator later accidentally changed Word-Cross to Cross-Word, and Arthur was fine with it, so the name stuck. Later Wynne played around with a variety of shapes and finally settled on the rectangle.

Arthur Wynne’s first Fun word Cross was published in his paper New York World on Sunday 21 December, 1913. The Word-Cross was well received and became a regular feature of the Fun page. Soon after that, World War 1 started. As the war progressed and the newspapers were full of depressing headlines and dire news reports, the crossword became a much needed refuge where readers could temporarily apply their minds to something challenging as well as satisfying. Crosswords became a comforting anchor through the uncertainty of wartime. By the time the war ended crosswords had become immensely popular.

During the early 1920’s other newspapers picked up the newly discovered pastime, and within a decade crossword puzzles were featured in almost all American newspapers. It was in this period crosswords began to assume their familiar form.

Crosswords were now being published in almost all newspapers—except in the New York Times. A 1924 editorial in the Times called crosswords “a primitive sort of mental exercise.” Interestingly, it took another World War for the New York Times to introduce the crossword—two decades after the rest of the newspapers in the USA did. Through the 20s and 30s the New York Times brushed it off as a passing fad, and deemed carrying a crossword on its pages as too low brow. They felt that the paper should hold the reader’s interest without needing to rely on a puzzle. But with the war, they realised the therapeutic value of the crossword. The first New York Times crossword ran on Sunday, February 15, 1942. Today the New York Times crosswords are among the trickiest and cleverest, and ones that solvers most aspire to crack.

After a decade of popularity in America, the crossword crossed the Atlantic. The first crossword to be published in Britain appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in February 1922, and it became very popular. The Times of London, as had the New York Times, initially scoffed at what it called “a menace because it (crossword) is making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society. Everywhere, at every hour of the day, people can be seen quite shamelessly poring over the checker-board diagrams, cudgelling their brains for a four-letter word meaning ‘molten rock’ …”  The Times resisted the popular wave until February 1 1930 when it published its first crossword.

The British crosswords quickly developed their own style. While the American crosswords usually had clues for which the answers were direct, based on general knowledge or word definitions, the British ones were more complex and the clues cleverly worded so as to have double or hidden meanings. And so emerged what became known as Cryptic crosswords. One of the creators of this kind of puzzle was a school master Derrick Somerset Macnutt. He compiled his puzzles under the pseudonym Ximenes, to avoid the wrath of frustrated cruciverbalists who could not crack his cryptic clues!

Simple or cryptic, the crossword was here to stay and developed its own band of followers, who went on to become addicts.

When the world was once again in the throes of World War II, the crossword played a similar role as it did in the first War–providing a respite from the gloom and doom stories on the news pages, and something to do in the blackout hours.  

The crossword had its own intriguing WW II moments. In England, Intelligence Officers found that some of the answers in the The Daily Telegraph’s puzzles were code names for secret undercover war missions. They were worried that crosswords were being used to communicate secret messages. They traced the puzzles back to a mild-mannered headmaster Leonard Dawe. But they could not find anything to incriminate him. The mystery remained unsolved until 1984, when one of Dawe’s former students came forward and said that along with some other students he had helped Dawe fill in his puzzles. The boys had used words that they had heard being used by soldiers in a military camp next to their school. Neither they nor their headmaster had the faintest idea that they had been accidental traitors!

By the time the war ended in 1945, for crossword solvers in Britain and America, it had transitioned from providing solace to becoming a ritual. And the faithful following of cruciverbalists has grown across the world. Today, the internet has brought changes in the form of the crossword, and many today get their daily fix on their computers and smart phones. But its function remains the same—to engage the mind in bringing order out of seeming chaos, and the very personal sense of achievement when the blanks begin to be populated with letters.

1 Down: Crossword lover American President (7 letters)        Answer: Clinton

Cheers to the Cruciverbalists! We have nothing to use but our brains!

–Mamata