![]() ![]() “The editor of FUN receives an average of twenty-five cross-words every day from readers,” he wrote in 1915, adding drolly that “the puzzle editor has kindly figured out that the present supply will last until the second week in December, 2100.”įinally, by 1921, Wynne had had enough, handing over the reins to Margaret Petherbridge, an aspiring reporter who was languishing as secretary to the paper’s Sunday editor. Wynne bemoaned the boxes of submissions that started filling up his office. They were also actively sending in construction submissions for consideration. Readers weren’t just doing the crossword. When the word game didn’t appear one Sunday, they demanded to know where it had gone, helping to ensure that the game stayed on as a regular feature. Wynne found the prep work tedious, and typographers resented setting up the puzzle shape for print. The word-cross-which eventually became cross-word, likely due to a type-setting accident, and later dropped the hyphen to become simply the crossword-wasn’t supposed to be a regular feature in the weekly supplement. ![]() But the instructions are familiar: “ill the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.” The game looks different than what we’re accustomed to today-it’s shaped like a diamond, with 72 white squares clustered around a blank center. Section editor Arthur Wynne, trying to fill the Christmas insert, drew inspiration from his native England, where Victorian newspapers and magazines regularly published word squares: acrostic puzzles where the same words can be read both across and down.īuilding on this prototype, Wynne debuted FUN’s Word-Cross Puzzle. The modern “word-cross” appeared for the first time in print in the December 21, 1913, edition of New York World’s FUN Supplement. I’m referring, of course, to the “cross-word mania” of the 1920s. ![]() In fact, 100 years before it entered the scene, an even bigger word puzzle craze swept. Wordle has since achieved global success through its no-frills design, once-daily refresh and spoiler-free way to share results on social media.īut Wordle’s swift ascendancy, which led to it getting acquired by the New York Times for upward of $1 million in January, isn’t unprecedented. In its short lifespan, Wordle has already made the tricky transition from cult phenomenon to established part of our daily lives.Ĭreated by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner in October 2021, the online word puzzle game gives you six tries to correctly guess a five-letter word each day. ![]()
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