Word Play: A welcome diversion

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, June 14th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next: Word Play for the month of June. Well, this is providential timing. Our all-new WORLD Magazine for July is now online and getting printed as we speak. If you’re a subscriber it’ll be in your home in a few weeks, but certainly before July 1st. And, really, if you’re not, you should be. The cover story’s by Myrna Brown this month. All the more reason to subscribe.

But we’ve added a cool new feature: a monthly crossword puzzle. And so that’s what I mean by providential timing, because here now is George Grant to tell us about the history of the crossword which didn’t start out that way. Listen:

GEORGE GRANT: On the eve of the First World War, Arthur Wynne, an editor at the New York World, introduced a new game for the newspaper’s weekly entertainment section. He created a blank word search grid with a series of clues and called it the Word Cross Puzzle. A typographical error in the composition room transposed the title to “crossword.” Wynne liked the sound of the mistake and decided to keep it.

Almost immediately, a host of subscribers to the paper became cruciverbalists. In other words, crossword fans. They saw the puzzle as a welcome diversion from the stress of increasingly troubled times. During the war years, and into the 1920s, the popularity of crossword puzzles boomed, with newspapers and magazines all across the English-speaking world copying Wynne’s basic concept. The “crossword craze” became a cultural institution, spawning contests, amateur and professional leagues, penny dreadful paperbacks, and even a hit song: “Crossword Mama, you puzzle me, but Papa’s gonna figure you out.”

In 1924, Richard Simon convinced his publishing partner Lincoln Schuster to print a collection of crosswords for Simon’s puzzle-loving aunt. Concerned by the book’s decidedly non-literary character, the partners went to print without the firm’s name on or in the volume. The small print run of 3,600 copies was an immediate success, prompting multiple new editions, eventually selling more than 100,000 copies.

Variations of the crossword concept abounded. In 1925, editors at the Saturday Westminster Gazette introduced Cryptic Crosswords, in which each clue is a word puzzle in itself. Then in 1938, the New York architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the Criss-Cross Words puzzle—a board game combining elements of anagrams and crosswords.It was a variation of an earlier word game he’d invented called Lexico. Unable to sell the idea to major game manufacturers, Butts produced a few sets himself, but a decade later, James Brunot redesigned the board, simplified the rules, and renamed the game Scrabble. Then came Sudoku, Nonograms, Griddlers, and Wordle.

For decades, the only major newspaper without a crossword feature was The New York Times. Over the years, they printed several editorials ridiculing the concept as “frivolous,” a “primitive sort of mental exercise.” But two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, The Gray Lady changed her tune, seeing the puzzles as a needful distraction from the worries of war. Crosswords have been in the Times ever since.

The musical theater icon Stephen Sondheim quipped, “The nice thing about doing a crossword is you know there’s a solution.”

Now, what’s another word for thesaurus?

I’m George Grant.

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