The Popularity Of Crossword Puzzles

Crossword puzzles are an extremely popular form of entertainment throughout the world, and have both a very short and an extremely long history. Crossword puzzles as they exist today are one of the youngest types of puzzles, having only been around for the past hundred years or so. However, crossword puzzles descended from a slightly different type of puzzle, the word square, which has been in existence since ancient Roman times and is still enjoyed today. There was even a rather impressive five letter word square found in Pompeii. Word squares are puzzles which must be solved by finding a set of words with the same number of letters which can be placed in a square so that the words are the same both vertically and horizontally. There are other, less strict, versions of this type of puzzle where there must be legible words both vertically and horizontally, but they do not have to be the same words in the same order. The very first crossword puzzle was published in the New York World newspaper on December 21, 1913, and was invented by a British journalist, Arthur Wynne. Since their inception, there have been many variations of the standard crossword puzzle, meaning that anyone who enjoys that type of puzzle has a huge variety of puzzles to choose from. This is one of the main reasons that crossword puzzles remain hugely popular today; there is so much innovation in the field that crosswords essentially always remain “fresh.” Besides today’s standard crossword form (which is actually slightly different from the original one which Wynne invented – it was in the shape of a diamond and had no black squares) there are crosswords which are completed with numbers, themed crossword collections, and cryptic crosswords wherein even the clues are brain teasers, which are very popular in Britain.