Arthur Wynne, an immigrant from England invented the first "crossword" puzzle published in the New York World on December 21, 1913. He had designed his first crossword based on word puzzles he saw in magazines as a youth in Liverpool, England. As a child Wynne would play a puzzle game called "Magic Squares" where the group of words had to be arranged so the letters would read the same way down and across. In remembering this game he would play, he came up with the idea which led to
crossword puzzles. He was in charge of creating the weekly puzzle page, an eight-page comic section in the New York World. His first puzzle was diamond-shaped, had easy clues, did not have any internal fl squares and was featured in the "Fun" section's "mental exercises" of the New York World. He also created riddles, rebuses, anagrams and word squares for the newspaper but the crossword was by far the most popular. At the time it was called a "word-cross" and had immediate success as it became a weekly feature. Being as popular with the readers as they were, readers would send in their crosswords that they had composed. In February 1914 Wynne was using his readers crosswords in his weekly posts, but there came a problem when the many typesetting errors caused the crossword to be dropped.
As the name evolved into "cross-word" the hyphen was dropped.
Crosswords were originally called word squares which can be traced back to the Roman ruins of Pompeii. They were originally created in the 19th century England as "word squares" and were the basis for
crossword puzzles for children, with pictures serving as clues for the answers which had educational value, they were not geared for adults until 1913 at which time adults starting doing them as well.
Arthur Wynne died on January 14, 1945 at the age of 73.
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