Date:21/12/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/12/21/stories/2007122160211100.htm

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Karnataka - Bangalore

The high of cracking that brainteaser

Ravi Shankar D.

Arthur Wynne constructed the world’s first word puzzle

Photo: Bijoy Ghosh

Engrossing pastime: It is all in the magic of those squares. —

BANGALORE: December 21 is the 94th anniversary of the crossword puzzle. In 1913, Arthur Wynne, a Liverpudlian working in the United States with a publication called The New York World, constructed the world’s first word puzzle, which he called the word cross. The puzzle was based on a game Mr. Wynne had played as a child called “Magic Squares”.

Popularity

The puzzle grew to become the cross-word till the hyphen was dropped. It took some years for the pastime to grow into its present popularity. By the 1930s, the crossword was a regular feature in many of the major newspapers around the world.

The crossword leapt across the Atlantic to become immensely popular in England, and commuters travelling to their London workplace spent their time on train attempting to solve the puzzle. The Times, The Guardian as well as The Observer had crossword compilers who spent hours constructing cryptic puzzles for the benefit of tens of thousands of enthusiasts.

When one newspaper dropped the crossword because of a series of mistakes in typography, the outcry was immense.

Famous crossword constructors such as Torquemada (Edward Powys Mathers), Ximenes (Derrick Somerset Macnutt) and Azed (Jonathan Crowther) associated with The Observer showed flashes of genius with their clues. Try cracking this clue (h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o) a five-letter word that begins with W and ends with R. Or waving palms (11-letter word that begins with W and ends with L).

If your appetite is whetted try this one: I have most of the time to stitch and then I iron (nine letters beginning with h and ending with e).

Solving a crossword clue is essentially matching your brain with that of the constructor and often the answer is all too simple. By the way, the answer to the first clue is water (H to O) and waving palms is Whitechapel (a railway station where travellers would be sent off with waving palms) and the third clue got you housewife.

With the advent of the Internet, crossword puzzles have taken on a new dimension.

The grids are posted online and often have a timer. The online versions also have a counter which indicates the number of people attempting to solve the puzzle at that moment, and one popular puzzle had 67,813 cruciverbalists busy simultaneously.